The Spanish kept their reign over the New World for quite some time. Their Northern rivals, the French, English, and the Dutch, continuously tried to derail Spanish power in the western Atlantic and Africa. Up until 1517, western Europeans had shared a single religion: Catholicism (Chapter 4, 117). This changed when Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, launched a religious revolution. Things quickly took the domino effect and new religious sects began to emerge. These new Protestant sects shattered the religious unity Western Europe had known for centuries (Chapter 4, 120).<\/p>\n
Europeans took their religious, political, and economic quarrels into and across the Atlantic. States did their best to secure as must as they could by conquest and Spain focused on maintaining a favorable balance of trade. France had set out to thwart Spanish power in trade. They eventually realized that one way to challenge Spanish power was to steal the American wealth that funded them. Kyle Kelsay<\/a> mentioned, \u201cpiracy became an important strategy of European nation’s states because it was a relatively inexpensive investment and advancement by 1650\u201d. Piracy became a central strategy in the European struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth century (Chapter 4, 134). They received state support through the form of letters of marque and reprisal. Instead of calling them pirates, they were referred to as corsairs or privateers.<\/p>\n Even with all the advances and efforts from the French and English, it was eventually the Dutch and their commercial and maritime strategies that was able to diminish Spanish power. It was not long before the Dutch surpassed the English as the most successful raiders in the first age of Atlantic piracy (Chapter 4, 143). By 1621, the Dutch had dominated the seas and the greater part of Atlantic trade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n