Soon after breaking out in Germany, the Protestant Reformation began to spill over into Switzerland. With its independent and fiercely individualistic cantons (aka states), a track record of small-scale religious reform movements, and a growing tide of national sentiment, Switzerland enjoyed some of the same key conditions which had helped the Reformation take hold in Germany. Just as Germanic Protestantism operated largely under the leadership of Martin Luther, many Swiss Protestants found their ideal teacher in Ulrich Zwingli, a highly educated devotee of the humanist theologian Erasmus. Zwingli was just as intense, uncompromising, and outspoken as his Germanic counterpart and his devotees followed his example. Before too long, many of the Swiss cantons declared their Protestant allegiance, but the region unfortunately was not able to institute lasting compromises between its new Protestant and established Catholic populations. Before too long, these tensions would boil over into two bloody civil wars – first in 1529 and again in 1531. It was during this last conflict that Zwingli was killed in battle.

Over the course of the late sixteenth century, a new Protestant sect began to displace Lutheranism as the dominant religious movement across Western Europe. Known as Calvinism, this Protestant sect took its name from its vastly influential leader, John Calvin. Unlike Martin Luther, John Calvin was openly political in his aims – he spoke out quite often of his desire to marry religious change with sociopolitical reform. Calvin put his philosophy to the ultimate test in the city of Geneva, when the city’s leaders personally offered to appoint Calvin as one of the city’s top administrators. Before long, Calvin had won nearly the entire populace of Geneva, high and low ranking alike, to his side and together they shaped the social patterns and political policies of the city after Calvinist doctrine.

Calvinism, much like Lutheranism and the other sectors of Protestantism which developed alongside them, attracted its fair share of controversy. Yet one of John Calvin’s doctrines drew far more protest than any other – namely, his notion of predestination. According to Calvin, predestination is the idea that the ultimate fate (heaven or hell) of each person has already been pre-determined by God, regardless of any earthly events or influences. Naturally, Calvinists all considered themselves to have been chosen from before birth as God’s saved people, while all other outsiders, as non-Calvinists, they believed to be necessarily beyond salvation. Of course, this idea outraged many people, Protestants, Catholics, and others besides, who were none too pleased to be told that John Calvin considered their lives as nothing more than an eternally doomed prospect.

Like the rest of Europe at the time, England had also been experiencing the stirring influences of the rising Protestant Reformation. But concrete action had yet to be taken, until King Henry VIII’s personal desires fatally clashed with Catholic dogma. Unhappy with his current wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, and desperate to finally have a male heir, King Henry VIII was determined to divorce Queen Catherine and wed her lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. However, divorce was a tricky matter during this era and could only be granted through Papal permission. King Henry personally appealed to Pope Clement VII, asking that he be allowed to divorce Catherine in favor of Anne, but the Pope, who was currently being held prisoner by Catherine’s nephew (aka the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) was not at all inclined to grant this request. Incensed, King Henry decided that he didn’t need to listen to the Vatican and he married Anne Boleyn anyway, declaring his divorce from Catherine to be legal under his authority as supreme sovereign of England. Then, in defiance of the Pope’s orders, in 1534 King Henry passed the Act of Supremacy, which declared that the entire nation of England was no longer a Catholic country, had no allegiance to the Vatican or to the Pope, and was no longer going to render either monetary or military support to the Papal State. Furthermore, King Henry declared that he himself, as England’s ruler, was the dominant religious leader in the land and so he created the Church of England (aka Anglicanism), the new official state religion.

As is true with most transformative movements (both political and social), the biggest threat to the Reformation actually came from within the group itself. After all, during the early days of the Reformation, the most powerful imperial forces (such as Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire) were far too busy quarreling and jockeying for power amongst themselves to muster up any serious opposition to the Protestant reformers. Consequently, the Reformation instead nearly tore itself apart from the inside, as various internal conflicts erupted. These disagreements had their roots in many concerns, including class differences, doctrinal disputes, and leadership concerns, and the many regional divisions that existed throughout the German area only exacerbated the dilemma. Further challenges to the Reformation were posed by several peasant uprisings that arose throughout Germany, as desperate peasants took up arms against their government. Many of these peasant groups claimed Luther as their inspiration, citing his teachings and support of individualism as ample justification for what they termed as their rebellion against the tyranny of the local German administrators. Yet Luther and many of his fellow Lutherans had no interest in involving themselves in any sort of political revolution – their mission, as they saw it, was religious and moral, rather than some sort of sociopolitical conflict. Luther therefore publically disavowed any support for the peasants, in what many historians regard as a savvy move, at least as it related to Luther's own survival.

Matteo Ricci is famous for his missionary work in China, on behalf of the Catholic Church, in the late sixteenth century. Ricci is responsible for many of the early in-roads made by Christianity in east Asia and is also one of the first Europeans to be able to read, write, and speak traditional Chinese.

The Gulek school of Tibetan Buddhism is famous for its historical relationship with the Yuan dynasty, a Chinese empire founded by victorious Mongol rulers.

The Russian empire's patronage extended to the Orthodox Christian church, not Geluk Buddhism, although many Buddhists lived in the Russian empire.

Historically, imperial Japan had its own forms of Buddhism such as Zen, not Tibetan based Geluk.

The Athenian empire had no Buddhist influence or culture.

The Zulu empire also had no Buddhist influence or culture.

The Edict of Nantes was issued by King Henry IV of France in 1598. It was primarily concerned with religious tolerance in France. It extended freedom of worship to French Calvinists (known as Huguenots) in what was, at the time, an officially and exclusively Catholic nation.

The Dominican and Franciscan religious orders are part of the group of religious orders known as the “mendicant orders.” These groups were known for renouncing all earthly possessions and for begging for financial support from the people they preached to. Both these groups were influential in European and global Christendom in the era immediately following the beginning of the Catholic Counter Reformation.

England embraced the Protestant Reformation during the reign of King Henry VIII (he of the six wives). Henry had been a devout Catholic in his early years, but was persuaded to renounce Catholicism after the Pope would not allow him to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry founded a new religion, called Anglicanism, which was Protestant in name but resembled Catholicism far more than the other branches of Protestantism spreading around Europe at the time.