The reformation and counter-reformation led to
a. greater religious tolerance.
b. less religious tolerance.
c. clearly defined religious states.
d. more uniformity of religion.

B. Less religious tolerance.

Explanation:

The first centuries of the Modern Age in Europe coincide with the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which led to a terrible period of religious wars.

In Germany, the confrontation between Catholic and Protestant princes ended in an open military conflict: the Schmalkaldic War; while social movements like the war of the German peasants or the Anabaptists had previously exploded, bloody persecuted by both sides, with the express blessing of both the Pope and Luther.

In France, the no less violent Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572) is framed in a prolonged series of wars of religion, which is the name with which they are particularly known, in which different social groups are framed in noble bands with opposites political, dynastic pretensions, and external alliances.

The Eighty Years' War meant the separation of the Netherlands into a Protestant north and a south that remained faithful to the Catholic Monarchy; its last phase (after a Truce of the twelve years) was included in a generalized European conflict: the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), initiated as a renewal of the Catholic-Protestant clashes of the Holy Roman Empire, which complicated with the intervention of Spain, France, and the Scandinavian monarchies.

The simultaneous wars of the three kingdoms in the British Isles also had an essential religious component.