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Religion in Western Europe played a major role in the movement across the Atlantic. Spain and Portugal had been uncontested by the rest of Western Europe in their quests to Africa and the Americas. However, the divide in religion in Western Europe pushed others to look towards the west.
Western Europe for many years had been a region without religious quarrel, as Catholicism dominated Western Europe. That all changed when Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, spoke out against the Catholic church and challenged some of their ideology that included the sales of indulgences and good behavior guarantees salvation (The Atlantic World, 117). David Zamarripa-Shippey wrote that the “Reformation granted Protestant Christianity a huge presence in several kingdoms ruled by Catholic monarchs such as England and France.” The spread of Protestant Christianity challenged Catholicism in every part of Western Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula where Spain’s King Philip II pushed out Protestant groups from the peninsula and became determined to preserve as well as expand Catholicism (The Atlantic World, 122). This rift caused bad blood between Catholics and Protestants, leading to wars and for some Protestant kingdoms, voyages across the Atlantic.
News surfaced in Northern Europe that the Spanish had not only been able to find unimaginable treasures in the Americas, but they also converted many of the peoples in the Americas to Catholicism (The Atlantic World, 125). These stories turned the attention of many Northern Europeans to the Americas. The fight between Catholics and Protestants would boil over into the Americas, where Protestants believed that they could save souls from Catholicism (The Atlantic World, 125). Kingdoms such as England, France, and the Netherlands, believed that they could not only claim their own stake in the Americas for economic purposes but perhaps steal from the Spanish and Portuguese as well (The Atlantic World, 130). With the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants boiling over into the Americas and the decline of the Spanish kingdom alongside the rise of the Dutch, English and French, the Americas were of a new interest for the rest of Western Europe.