page_title: Four kingdoms of Daniel
section_title: Protestant Reformation
hierarchical_section_title: Four kingdoms of Daniel / Traditional views / Protestant Reformation
caption_attribution_description: English: The lion represents the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. The bear represents the Persian King, Cyrus.
context_page_description: The four kingdoms of Daniel are four kingdoms which, according to the Book of Daniel, precede the "end-time" and the "Kingdom of God".
context_section_description: A series of Protestant theologians, such as Jerome Zanchius (1516–1590), Joseph Mede (1586–1639), and John Lightfoot (1602–1675), particularly emphasized the eschatological theory of four monarchies. Mede and other writers (such as William Guild (1586–1657), Edward Haughton and Nathaniel Stephens (c. 1606–1678)) expected the imminent end of the fourth empire, and a new age. The early modern version of the four monarchies in universal history was subsequently often attributed to the chronologist and astrologer Johann Carion, based on his Chronika (1532). Developments of his Protestant world chronology were endorsed in an influential preface of Philipp Melanchthon (published 1557).
  The theory was topical in the 1550s. Johann Sleidan in his De quatuor imperiis summis (1556) tried to summarise the status of the "four monarchies" as historical theory; he had already alluded to it in previous works. Sleidan's influential slant on the theory was both theological, with a Protestant tone of apocalyptic decline over time, and an appeal to German nationalist feeling in terms of translatio imperii. The Speculum coniugiorum (1556) of the jurist Alonso De la Vera Cruz, in New Spain, indirectly analysed the theory. It cast doubts on the Holy Roman Emperor's universal imperium by pointing out that the historical 'monarchies' in question had in no case held exclusive sway. The Carion/Melanchthon view was that the Kingdom of Egypt must be considered a subsidiary power to Babylon: just as France was secondary compared to the Empire.
  The Catholic Jean Bodin was concerned to argue against the whole theory of 'four monarchies' as a historical paradigm. He devoted a chapter to refuting it, alongside the classical scheme of a Golden Age, in his 1566 Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem.
caption: The lion represents the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. The bear represents the Persian King, Cyrus.
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