Historic religion in Europe

Generally speaking, why did most Romance peoples in Europe remain Catholic while Germanic peoples became Protestant? Is there any cultural or ethnic factors that could explain this split? Also, how do the Poles and Croats fit into this, why did they become Catholic rather than following other Slavs into Orthodoxy?

Attached: Europe_religion_map_situation_1950_en.png (1473x1198, 1.24M)

good question

>Is there any cultural or ethnic factors that could explain this split?

Protestantism appeared in Germany first and was spread by Germans so obviously nations closer to Germany adopted it more easily due to cultural and linguistic proximity.

>Also, how do the Poles and Croats fit into this, why did they become Catholic rather than following other Slavs into Orthodoxy?

Just a political choice, when our pagan duke united Polish tribes into a country in the 960s, he needed strong political allies to reinforce his rule and have allies against neighbors. At that time, the strongest country around was Czechia, which was a catholic state already and to make the alliance and marry a Czech princess, our duke had to adopt catholicism first so he did. Another reason was that our duchy was endangered by periodic German raids who justified this with Poland's paganism, if Poland had adopted the eastern rite, which was already seen as "suspicious" by the west, including Germany, it might have been not enough to stop German raids.

In 16th century protestantism initially made huge progress in Poland, there were a lot of converted nobles who introduced the new faith in their fiefdom and one of the kings was very liberal when it comes to religion (a saying "I am not a king of your consciences" is attributed to him) but eventually it was surpressed by counter-reformation as our next kings were already fanatically catholic.

bumping for more discussion

Protestantism directly led to the scientific dominance of Germanic countries over catholic countries as Protestantism stressed the importance of every Christian being able to read the Bible, making it easier for people to become scribes

>bunch of corrupt southrons run the place
>nothing works as intended
>break off and start doing your own thing
It's also the future of the EU.

Jesuits contributed more to sciences like physics than protestants did in their time and also protestant countries owe a hige debt to jewish scientists.

What a cope, even before Jews became scientists in german speaking lands they had Copernicus and Gutenberg. Also pretty much 60 years after protestantism appeared they have more relevant scientists and mathematicians than catholics.

VGHHHHHHHHHHH THE EU THAT IS RAN BY GREECE, ITALY AND BULGARIA

VGH VGH VGH

best EU