The suppression of monasteries refers to various events at different times and places when monastic foundations were abolished and their possessions were appropriated by the state.
Additionally, there were cases of specific monasteries at various times and places being disbanded as a result of power struggles within the Catholic Church.
In 845 the Chinese Emperor Wuzong of Tang suppressed thousands of Buddhist monasteries and confiscated their considerable properties.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Outer Mongolia had 583 monasteries and temple complexes, which controlled an estimated 20 percent of the country's wealth.
The act permitted only monastic orders that dealt with teaching, nursing and other practical work within the Holy Roman Empire.
The number of monks (whom the Emperor called "shaven-headed creatures whom the common people worship on bended knees")[2] dropped from 65,000 to 27,000.
The edict fits in with Joseph's ecclesiastical reforms, in which he sought to control the church in Austria and the Empire and saw it as an arm of the state.
Emperor Joseph II's Edict on Idle Institutions was applied also in the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), reducing the number of monasteries there.
Thereupon, the French Revolution's militant anticlerical policies, already implemented in France itself, were applied to this new territory - which included the dissolution of convents and monasteries as well as confiscation of ecclesiastical properties and the separation of Church and State.
Further laws under his successor over the course of the 1530s banned the friars, and forced monks and nuns to transfer title to their houses to the Crown, which passed them out to supportive nobles, who soon acquired former monastic lands.
Although some monastic foundations dated back to Anglo-Saxon England, the overwhelming majority of the 825 religious communities dissolved by Henry VIII owed their existence to the wave of monastic enthusiasm that had swept England and Wales in the 11th and 12th centuries; in consequence of which religious houses in the 16th century controlled appointment to about a third of all parish benefices, and disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income.
[4] In December, the Assembly began to sell the lands to the highest bidder to raise revenue, effectively decreasing the value of the assignats by 25 percent in two years.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "the monastery, with a small portion of the surrounding pastures, was rented from the State until the last monks were expelled by two squadrons of dragoons on the 19th of April, 1903".
Bernardo Tanucci, who was the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the second half of the 18th century, was a most zealous regalist, seeking to establish the supremacy of a modernized State over the Catholic Church.
Among other measures undertaken under the principles of enlightened absolutism, he closed convents and monasteries, distributing their lands among noble supporters of the Monarch, thus strengthening the royal presence in the Regno.
Luther, a former Augustinian friar, found some comfort when these views had a dramatic effect: a special meeting of the German province of his order held the same year accepted them and voted that henceforth every member of the regular clergy should be free to renounce their vows, resign their offices and get married.
Under the influence of Josephinism the laicisation of several monastic foundations was undertaken in Catholic parts of Germany, Austria and Hungary.
Elsewhere, former monasteries were often made available as housing and workshops to the numerous Protestant refugees (estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000) who escaped or were expelled from the South Netherlands, which were overrun by the Spanish army and where the Catholic Church was triumphant.
In particular, former monasteries were used as workshops for Protestant weavers displaced from such towns as Bruges and Ghent who re-established themselves in various cities of the Dutch Republic.
He was charged several times with enticing to "papistrie" from 1578 to 1605, until finally he was arrested in 1605, in spite of the resistance of the whole countryside, and transported to Edinburgh, where he was tried and sentenced to exile.