Christendom Destroyed

10. Schism

THE COMING OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

The Protestant Reformation was a religious schism, like that between western and Orthodox Christianity in the eleventh century only messier. It reshaped the mental landscape of Christendom. Belief took on a new meaning. Contemporaries had nothing in their experience with which to understand the transformation. Local antipathies to the jurisdictional apparatus and infrastructure of Christendom had been coterminous with its emergence but it had lived with them. Heretical movements – a way by which Christendom’s infrastructure chose to characterize those antipathies – were also part of the later medieval landscape, although their adherents had been persecuted and (with the exception of the Hussites in Bohemia) crushed, reduced to localized remnants. The agenda of Church reform, expressed through the Conciliar Movement, had engaged the secular authorities in Europe in the fifteenth century, which had used the issue for their own political purposes. But its moment had come and gone, except in the German polity. Christendom was never as orthodox as in 1500.

The religious revolt of the sixteenth century did not aim to destroy Christendom. On the contrary, it’s first protagonist, Martin Luther, saw himself as saving it from its enemies within. He set about the Reformation which the pope and bishops had failed to provide, thereby averting the wrath of God. By 1520, after reading (among other things) the exposure by the humanist Lorenzo Valla of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, Luther became convinced that the Roman hierarchy was a tyranny in the service of the Antichrist. Those responsible for reform were the greatest obstacle to it. In March 1520 he wrote his Treatise on Good Works. In tone, it was not an anti-papal rant but an exposition of Christian responsibilities, organized as a commentary on the Ten Commandments. When he discussed the obedience owed to ‘the spiritual authorities’ (i.e. the pope and bishops), however, the radical dimensions of Luther’s thinking for Christendom emerged. Those authorities ‘behave towards their responsibilities like mothers who forsake their children and run after their lovers’. The spiritual authorities are ‘in all respects more worldly’ than secular authorities themselves. They practise what they should prevent, and they command and prescribe things contrary to the first three Commandments, while Christendom decays around them. In these circumstances, ‘anyone who is able to do so’ should come to Christendom’s aid. He called upon kings, princes and nobles ‘for the benefit of Christendom and to prevent blasphemy and the disgrace of the divine name’ to resist the ‘scarlet whore of Babylon’ (the pope). Indeed, he said, ‘it is the only way left to us’.

By June 1520 when this treatise was published, the implications of Luther’s critique were just beginning to be felt. By declaring that popes could be wrong, that the ecclesiastical fabric was in alien hands and that Church councils could not be depended upon, Luther reflected where he thought the foundations for authority within Christendom lay. God’s Word had become flesh in Jesus Christ. Everything had changed at that moment in human history. Christ was the only source for authority in Christendom. As that moment receded, so the possibilities for corruption increased, making truth harder to recover. But God’s Word had been preserved in Scripture, the agent and content of divine Revelation. Scripture needed no interpreter. Anyone with faith in God’s redeeming mercy would find truth there manifest. It was Luther’s radical rewriting of tradition which made the Protestant Reformation different from preceding heretical movements.

That was recognized in The Defence of the Seven Sacraments (1522), the treatise written by King Henry VIII in response to Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520). The English king posed as the Defender of Christendom. He used biblical and patristic arguments to maintain the seven sacraments, showing that there was a concurrence of support for them which could only be a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Luther’s reply was brutal and to the point. If Christian faith depended for its veracity only upon the length of time of its credence, and the common agreement and customs of men, then it did not differ from the beliefs of Turks or Jews. Traditions and customs were no more than gossip (Menschen Sprüche). King Henry was like an ass who ‘sticks its head in the sack’.

Luther’s appeal to the Estates of Christendom – kings, princes and nobles – lay at the heart of the second reason why the Protestant Reformation was different from previous dissident religious movements. Luther’s Reformation summoned up more powerful political and social forces in support of change whose alliance coalesced in German-speaking Europe. The evangelical Protestant movement drew strength from a politically fragmented Holy Roman Empire and neighbouring Swiss Confederation. New players appeared – preachers, city magistrates, printers and publicists, urban and rural mass movements – and printing and other forms of dissemination made the dynamic of the movement and its underlying political and social forces seem more powerful and integrated than in reality was the case. The tendencies to fragmentation within the early Protestant Reformation were as significant as the forces which it initially unleashed. Its survival and evolution depended on the political forces to whom Luther made his appeal in 1520.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE SWISS CONFEDERATION

These were the political map’s most complex entities. Even their titles were unclear. The Reich was Roman (Imperium Romanum), Christian (Imperium Christianum) and universal (Imperium mundi). ‘Schwitzerland’ was the term used for the original allies from the region of Schwyz, around Lake Lucerne, which made up the original Swiss Confederation. Subsequently, other cantons and communities attached themselves to this core which still acknowledged the overlordship of the emperor. Then Swiss proximity to Habsburg claims and aspirations created a rift. Emperor Maximilian I attempted to annex parts adjoining Switzerland, but the inhabitants of the disputed regions formed three leagues, two of which joined the Confederation in 1497 and 1498. The more effectively organized of these was the Grey Leagues. The threat from the Habsburgs in Swiss lands, and notably from Emperor Maximilian’s reforms, led to a rift. Formally, the Swiss remained within the Reich, but even the Swiss cities bordering German lands (Basel and Schaffhausen) ceased to attend the German Diets after 1530 and Swiss autonomy was an actuality – its independence recognized in the Peace of Westphalia (1648).

The border between Switzerland and the empire was only one of numerous complexities for anyone trying to work out the frontiers of either entity. The empire had three nominal imperial arch-chancellors (the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne), servicing its German, Burgundian and Italian affairs respectively, of which only the first was functional by 1500. Imperial jurisdictions in northern Italy were a thing of the past, and its Burgundian jurisdictions had become absorbed into Habsburg or Valois territorial dominions; or, in the Low Countries, were peripheral to its affairs. Even in northern and eastern Germany, where the frontiers of the empire were at their clearest, things were not straightforward. Pomerania, Brandenburg and Silesia were territories held in fief to the emperor. The lands of the old crusading Order of Teutonic Knights were not, but when the territories of the Prussian branch of the order were secularized in 1525 they devolved into the hands of the order’s Hohenzollern Grand Master. So Prussia was only part of the empire by virtue of being in the hands of the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns.

To the south of Brandenburg lay the territories of the kingdom of Bohemia (including the duchy of Silesia and the margravates of Moravia and Lusatia). These lands were inherited by the Habsburgs in 1526 but their status in the empire was peculiar. Bohemia was the only kingdom to exist as a subordinate entity within the empire. The Bohemian king was one of the imperial Electors, so his lands were exempt from imperial jurisdiction. But as a king he did not directly participate in the deliberations of the Electoral College. The Bohemians insisted that theirs was an elective monarchy. Even when Charles V’s brother, Ferdinand I, inherited the kingdom in 1526, the Bohemian Estates went through the formality of ‘electing’ him, thereby putting down a marker for Bohemia’s semi-detachedness from the empire.

The frontiers of the Swiss Confederation were defined by those of the self-governing communities which composed it, alike only in their independence from other princes and rulers. They were most subject to change in the two outer cantons of Zürich to the east and Bern to the west. Zürich was not large (about 7,000 inhabitants in 1520). By its municipal charter of 1498 it was a self-governing entity, made up of representatives from the town and its rural hinterland. It acted as the diplomatic and political instrument of the Confederation in German lands, putting out feelers to southern German cities who might be persuaded to join it, and reluctantly agreeing with Bern in negotiations (for example, in 1516 and 1521) for treaties to provide the French monarchy with mercenary forces. Bern was not much bigger than Zürich but its municipal charter was less participative. Bern’s oligarchs enjoyed French monarchical protection and hoped to realize benefits from it by securing the overlordship of its neighbours around Lake Geneva. In 1536, they acquired Vaud, Thonon and Ternier, leaving Geneva as an independent city.

Neither the Swiss nor the empire had a constitution. The thirteen full members of the Swiss Confederation discussed matters of common significance at a Diet, an important forum for negotiations as, first the issue of mercenaries, and then the Reformation, threatened to tear the Confederation apart. The empire was an elective monarchy, candidates to the imperial throne being elected by the seven Electors to the empire. The emperor was expected to hold regular Diets or meetings of the German Estates, summoned by the emperor (with the Electors’ permission) in accordance with a 1495 agreement known as the ‘Perpetual Peace’.

Numbers fluctuated, but there were about twenty-five major secular principalities and an additional ninety archbishoprics, bishoprics and abbeys, along with around a hundred counts, who attended the second chamber. Clerical representation reflected the fact that about 16 per cent of the Reich was ruled by prince-bishops and archbishops whose dioceses extended even further than their principalities, creating disputes with neighbouring jurisdictions. The third chamber brought together the representatives of about sixty-five imperial cities, varying in size from the impressively large (Cologne) to the tiny (Dinkelsbühl – under 5,000 inhabitants). By 1500, the procedures for a Diet had become standardized. During the opening session, the imperial ‘proposition’ was read out, constituting the agenda for the Estates. The Estates then met separately and, if they agreed on a recommendation, it was transmitted to the emperor. When the Diet was completed, its conclusions (and the emperor’s consent to them) were published as a Recess. Each Recess constituted imperial law. Among others with rights to be represented at the Diets were the imperial knights, holding fiefs through which they owed their allegiance directly to the emperor. Mainly concentrated in Swabia, Franconia and the upper and middle Rhine, they provided the emperor with a bargaining counter against larger principalities.

The juridical framework distinguished the Reich from the Swiss Confederation. A recent development, it resulted from the movement for imperial reform in the later fifteenth century, part of a broader dynamic by which the constituent elements of the empire defined their relationship with the emperor. The movement bore fruit in the Diets of Worms and Augsburg. The Diets became a more important and recognized body. An Imperial Chamber Court was established, independent of the emperor and his court. Although the emperor had the right to appoint its presiding judge, the Estates nominated ordinary judges. The court took over imperial prerogatives, its remit being to maintain peace and justice and adjudicate disputes between the emperor’s vassals. It was implicitly acknowledged that the emperor could, in extraordinary circumstances, revoke laws or deprive corporations of their privileges, using plenary powers. But the prevailing assumption among the lawyers advising German territorial princes and cities was that he was bound by both natural and divine law, and that he had to aim at the common good. In ordinary circumstances, his ‘public person’ as supreme judge of the empire had been surrendered to the imperial court, which promoted Roman law as the basis for the empire’s legal practices. In 1500, a regional structure to enforce the decisions of the imperial court and the Diets was also put in place through the institution of six Circles (regional territorial groupings).

Charles V’s election in 1519 set another precedent. As a result of negotiations prior to his election, he agreed a capitulation with the Electors. His prerogatives would be exercised only with the consent of Electors and Diets. He confirmed the rights of the Electors during interregnums and imperial absences. He promised to respect the rights and dignities of all and to enforce the terms of the Perpetual Peace of the empire. Foreign treaties were to be dependent on the consent of the Electors. Charles promised to live in Germany, to appoint only Germans to serve the empire, and never to summon a Diet to meet outside the Reich. He committed himself to negotiate with Rome to reduce the ecclesiastical taxes paid by Germans, and to establish a new imperial governing council, through which to introduce further reforms into the Reich. These promises, to be monitored by Electors and Diets, became a precedent; all subsequent emperors had to subscribe to similar documents. Charles’s became one more constraint (in addition to his prolonged absences from German lands), when it came to his handling of the Protestant schism.

So, unlike Switzerland, the German empire was a mature political and juridical entity. Only in the empire did Church and imperial reform intermingle. The Reformation of Sigismund was the most popular document to make the link. Drafted in Basel, probably in 1439, it was reprinted nine times before 1522 and imagined a priest-king named Frederick who would head up a reform in which the plain-speaking ‘German’ folk would vanquish their oppressors and overcome ‘Latins’ and their subtle ways. Since both Church and imperial reform joined the dynamic in which the empire’s elements were defining their relationships with the emperor, so Luther’s call for a Reformation had a particular resonance there.

Although not its instigators, the beneficiaries of reform were the princes. The empire’s evolution allowed them to present themselves as its primary law-makers and keepers of the peace. At the same time, the number of German noble counts was gradually diminishing as a small group of dynasties among the higher nobility consolidated their lands and titles by inheritance and acquisition, aggregating to themselves the powers of princes. The Landgrave of Hesse is a classic example. In 1518, the fourteen-year-old Philip of Hesse claimed to rule an agglomeration of previously separate counties (Katzenelnbogen, Ziegenhain and others) along with the Hesse principalities (Upper and Lower Hesse) to constitute a haphazardly assembled principality. The process was assisted by agreements with local and regional groups of nobles, towns and ecclesiastical corporations, as well as dynastic compacts which limited the possibilities for the dynastic dispersal of their lands and titles. German princes began to introduce appeal courts into their dominions, thereby reinforcing their sense of being no longer one among many vassals of the empire but rulers of it, by virtue of, and in line with, its emerging political practices.

Even before the Protestant Reformation, princes and imperial cities attempted to strengthen their control over monasteries and dioceses within their spheres of influence. In Switzerland too, the cantonal city of Zürich chose the clergy, promoted reform in monasteries, controlled what the laity gave the Church, and used their sponsorship of sermons at Advent and Lent as a way of controlling who preached what. Princes equally challenged episcopal and papal authority in their lands. Duke George of Albertine Saxony, for example, pressured the clergy in the diocese of Meissen into submission to his influence. Margrave Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg enforced his rights to tax the dioceses in his domains. Landgrave Philip of Hesse sought to remove the remaining jurisdictional authority of the archbishopric of Mainz in his lands. At the Diet of 1511, German princes allied with the French king, Louis XII, to call for Church reform. For his part, the emperor, seeking to neutralize the criticism, put himself at the head of reforming endeavours in both Church and empire. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1518, Emperor Maximilian I led the opposition to the demand from Rome for an imperial levy to fund the war in Hungary against the Infidel on the grounds that it could be granted only once Church reform had been seriously undertaken. Church reform was thus an active issue in German politics before Luther came on the scene.

CHRISTENDOM’S SACRAL LANDSCAPE

Religious experience was essential to the lived reality of Christendom. Nothing is harder, however, than discovering what people really thought about religion. The religion of the laity was very different as between the learned and the unlettered. Such differences were recognized in contemporary debates (intensified by the Reformation) about what constituted superstition and magic. The concerns of the laity were influenced by and overlapped (but did not coincide) with those of the clergy. The latter were a varied order in society, some (‘regulars’) in monastic communities, others (‘seculars’) sustaining the parochial and diocesan life of the Church. The evidence for what people believed is as ambiguous as the analytical categories (‘popular’, ‘élite’, ‘superstition’, ‘magic’, ‘holy’, ‘belief’) are crude. When the Franciscans began their missionary work in the New World in the sixteenth century, the gulf between their religious experience and that of the Amerindians was immense. The same cannot be said for the distances separating the unlearned and the lettered, the laity and the clergy in Europe on the eve of the Reformation. Christian Europe had been constructed over centuries on the basis of an interaction between its élites and the rest. That interaction was intensified by the printed word. The variety and density of religious experience were considerable on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.

Lettered contemporaries were aware of it. In 1517, Antonio de Beatis, chaplain and amanuensis to an Italian cardinal, accompanied him on a visit north of the Alps. Arriving in Cologne, he admired the ‘infinite number’ of reliquaries in the ‘large and beautiful cathedral’, as well as the unique collection of skulls in the church of St Ursula, the relics of the 11,000 virgins. In the choir of the Franciscan monastery, he venerated the remains of the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, while in that of the neighbouring and rival order of the Dominicans he looked through the glass plate under the high altar to see the body of Scotus’s antagonist Albert Magnus and was shown the chair from which he had taught. On one of the city’s hills, he visited a female canonry where he discovered that, although the canonesses ate and slept in the convent, by day they walked the streets in pairs. Beatis compared what he saw with his native Italy: ‘They pay such attention to divine worship and their churches, and build so many new ones, that when I think of the state of religion that obtains in Italy . . . I feel no little envy of this region and I am pained to the heart by the scant devotion of us Italians.’

Beatis found that what was ‘holy’ in the Rhineland was different from what was ‘holy’ in his native Naples. That variety appears in other evidence. Testamentary bequests recorded what people chose to will from their estates as pious bequests. An abundance of images, murals, altarpieces and carvings from the period prior to the Reformation is preserved. There is a good deal known about the popularity of religious shrines and the significance of pilgrimage. Historians can say something about the meaning of religion as framing the pattern of people’s lives. Yet the variety of what was regarded as holy makes it difficult to evaluate what religion meant on the eve of the Reformation.

People bought religious literature in large quantities. The inventory of a bookseller in Amiens from 1509 furnishes some idea of what was popular. It included forty-one different titles and 1,240 volumes, of which religious works constituted the overwhelming majority. Among the most numerous were manuals to assist in domestic prayer: almost 800 copies of books of hours, including 300 alone in large print format for children. There were also Psalters (editions of the Psalms), Mass books and postils (commentaries on the Bible readings, Sunday by Sunday), books of religious instruction (the antecedents of catechisms), pamphlets expounding the Ten Commandments, the virtues or the sacraments. Finally, there were volumes devoted to the lives of the saints, the most popular being Jacques de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. But this evidence indicates only what (literate) people were expected to read, and what was saleable. Many of the books on the shelves in Amiens were in Latin. Such literature does not tell us how readers understood what they read, nor how they integrated it into their experience.

The bedrock of the Church was the parish. Parishes covered the length and breadth of western Christianity. That was where the vast majority of the population attended Mass, made their offerings, confessed and took communion once a year. Parochial Christianity, however, was more than a religious experience. It was a set of rights to benefices which were the key to monopoly revenues (the tithe, collected in various forms) in which patrons, collators and clergymen all had interests. And behind every parish church lay wardens who cared for the fabric of the church, managed the parish chest and organized the patronal feast. In the urban world, the role of the parish in local life was perhaps not as great as it once was, but wills attest to an attachment to the church where one was baptized, and where often one’s ancestors were buried. The parish represented a given, the place of religious duty, but not necessarily devotion. The incumbent vicar of a small parish outside Mainz on the eve of the Reformation explained that nine out of ten of his flock did not confess their sins and therefore did not receive Christ’s body at Easter.

Diocesan visitations took place from time to time in the pre-Reformation Church and kept an eye on non-observance. They also noted clerical absenteeism (widespread, sometimes for justifiable reasons – such as undertaking diocesan duties) and, where it was brought to their attention by locals, clerical incontinence and incompetence. Both the latter, however, were less marked in surviving visitations before the Reformation than one might suppose from later Protestant critique. The reality was that, at least in rural Europe, zealous, chaste and over-educated parish clergy would probably have been regarded with suspicion. The priest’s role was more that of a notable, settling family quarrels, drafting wills and providing rural credit. Locals wanted someone who would understand them.

Unlike parishes, laymen chose the confraternities – lay brotherhoods, devoted to religious and charitable service – to which they belonged. These were increasing on the eve of the Reformation and contributed to the variety of local religious experience. In Normandy, for example, confraternal ‘charities’ were, for some reason, far more in evidence in the dioceses of Lisieux and Évreux than in the coastal bishoprics of Avranches, Coutances or Bayeux. They were more an urban than a rural phenomenon. Although there was no correlation between them and craft guilds, the two often blended together so that, to take just one example, at Rouen, a city with something like 40,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Reformation, there were some 131 confraternities, many of them reflecting the city’s artisan trades.

The social diversity of these organizations was as varied as their role. In a few places, beggars had their own confraternity, although more typically the pattern was of social diversity in which an unofficial hierarchy of leading figures in a community acted as syndics and treasurers. Besides supporting their members in times of hardship, confraternities saw to the burial of their number and prayed for the release of their souls from Purgatory. The maintenance of confraternal side-altars, anniversary Masses and the lighting of votive candles – these were common denominators of confraternal religious experience on the eve of the Reformation. Their hymns, mystery plays, flagellant processions (the battuti of northern Italy) and penitential rituals were part of a flamboyance in which it is hard to imagine that an experience of religion of some sort was not present for almost all people, either regularly or episodically.

The diocesan rites, litanies and saints’ days reveal the same diversity. Contemporary concerns about superstition (crudely, the manipulation of holy power for secular purposes) are readily comprehensible. Was the Christian message being lost amid the rich texture of ritual and the lush sacral landscape? What, for example, did the people of the Louron valley in the Pyrenees make of the frescoes inside and outside their churches? Painted by unknown craftsmen, they can be dated only to sometime on the eve of the Reformation. The murals offered a glimpse of the Church’s answers to the questions: How are we saved? Who is saved? At the chapel of Mont, worshippers passed a fresco of the Last Judgment as they entered the church. Christ is portrayed in majesty at the end of the world like a judge, sitting in a tribunal over the world, accompanied by advocates and the scales of justice (the Devil is trying to tip them his way). The angels are blowing their bugles to awake the dead for judgment from Purgatory. The Devil, pictured as a monster, is ready to receive those sinners who are convicted to the flames of Hell. The good people of Mont, however, could take heart: Heaven is full and Hell is empty. This was, after all, an image for them on their way to and from church, and its responsibility was to save sinners. Across the valley, another chapel had the tree of Jesse painted in the chancel, a reminder of the ancestry of sacred ministry. Such images were the ‘Bibles for the poor’, medieval Christianity’s justification for religious art. But whether, and how, these images were understood by local inhabitants is another matter.

Theologians, whose business it was, debated how salvation worked – to what degree, if any, we human beings could contribute to it ourselves. Preachers and confessors were more inclined to dramatize it, just as the Louron murals did. Image-makers, printers and preachers found death and the prospect of judgement merchandisable commodities, leaving behind the sense (probably overdrawn) that salvation was an overwhelming preoccupation of Christians. Preachers also emphasized the importance of human responsibility, our role in our own salvation. Like the Louron murals, sermons created a vivid impression of what the pains of Purgatory and Hell were like. But they also showed how suffering could be attenuated by penitence and intercession.

The Church was the primary place where such penitence was efficacious. Christ had power to forgive sins and he had passed it on to the pope for the Church to dispense. The Eucharist offered absolution for sins committed by the living and advocacy for the souls of the dead. Requiem Masses for the souls of the dead were requested plentifully. Wills show that these were becoming commodified, the more you could afford being a better guarantee of salvation. Pilgrimages to the great sanctuaries of Christendom, including the voyage to the Holy Land, were popular, but regional shrines could offer something of the same penitential status. The popularity of such shrines is attested by the elaborateness of ex-voto offerings from the faithful. The issuing by the papacy of rights to such pardons in the form of purchasable letters of indulgence to fund the building of hospitals, churches, even (in the Netherlands) dykes, was an extension of plenary remittance. The letters required the penitent to undertake some personal act of contrition and, in return, offered a promise of participating in the benefits of the charitable works that the sponsored institution would eventually provide to others. Such penitential processes tended to increase on the eve of the Reformation, and not merely for the self-serving and mercenary reasons ascribed by Protestants. There is no sign that the coming of the Reformation can be explained by the ‘abuses’ of the Church. All the evidence (construction, donations, pilgrimages, elaborate triptych altarpieces) is that it was flourishing. And the diversity of ritual and experience was held in an embrace of orthodoxy by a Church that claimed a monopoly on truth and salvation. Martin Luther’s claims to a different truth and way to salvation changed that.

LUTHER’S WAY

‘For the beginning was ful small, and in manner to be contemned, and one man alone sustained the malice and violence of the whole world.’ This was how Johannes Philippson von Schleiden (Sleidan) pictured the early years of the Protestant Reformation in the preface to his Commentaries (1555), its first historian. He experienced the excitement of the new religious movement. As a Strasbourg lawyer and diplomat, he witnessed the Schmalkaldic War (1546–7), a conflict between its political protectors and the emperor, which, struggling to be impartial, he interpreted as God’s providence humbling an emperor through the agency of Luther. The latter’s critics saw him as an evil force, tearing Christendom apart. Sleidan read the life of Luther by one of them, Johannes Cochlaeus. In it, the author – an eye-witness to Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms in 1521 – depicted him as in league with the Devil, driven by carnal lust and an insatiable desire to topple authority. Both sides propagated the myth that the Protestant Reformation had begun with an obscure monk in Saxony. The Protestant Reformation was not, however, a one-man show. If there had been no Martin Luther, the powerful currents for religious change would have found their catalysts – they had already begun to do so in the Rhineland and Switzerland by the time of Luther’s appearance at Worms. But without Luther as the super-catalyst it would not have been the Protestant Reformation.

Luther himself was ambivalent about the dramatic events of his life. On the one hand, his contribution was modest: ‘I simply taught, preached, wrote . . . otherwise I did nothing . . . The Word did it all.’ There were no strange portents in the sky or miracles of healing, and Protestant myth-makers had to create those after his death. His birthplace was twice saved from fire in the sixteenth century, a ‘great sign’. A painting of him turned out to be ‘incombustible’ during the Thirty Years War. Luther was, however, tempted to see himself as the particular vehicle for God’s strange work. In 1531, he quoted the heretic Jan Hus, facing execution (‘I might be a weak goose [in Czech, Hus = goose], but more powerful birds will come after me’) and adapted the words to himself; ‘they may have cooked a goose in 1415 but, a century later, it has turned into a swan’. At Luther’s funeral, Johann Bugenhagen repeated the allusion, reminding Catholic opponents that Luther had died in his bed: ‘You may cook a goose, but in a hundred years’ time there will come a man you will not be able to roast.’ His point was that God’s truth could not be smothered. Looking back, drifting from memory to anecdote, Luther furnished glimpses of how he thought it had come about, but it is like looking at sepia photographs from long ago. Here is Luther in July 1505, paralysed by a near-death experience in a thunderstorm, making a vow to St Anne that he would become a monk if he survived. There is the image of Luther’s ‘eureka moment’, a theological breakthrough while at work in his study on the third floor of a tower on the city wall, the latrine nearby – Luther’s famous ‘Tower Experience’ (Das Turmerlebnis). We cannot date that one, and perhaps the photograph is not what we think it is. What Luther discovered, when, and how significant it was, is an industry of its own.

For that reason, the story is well-known and, in some respects, unremarkable. Luther was no different from many clerics of his day: a bright boy from a modest background, the kind that kept the Church going. He called himself a peasant, but that should be glossed, for his father (Hans) was a miner and married the daughter of a local notable from Eisleben. Luther graduated from Erfurt University in 1505 and made his vows to become a monk in the Order of the Hermits of St Augustine that same year, despite his father’s opposition. In 1508, he began lecturing in moral philosophy at the recently founded University of Wittenberg. In 1512, he was awarded his doctorate and became professor of biblical theology, its town preacher two years later. In 1525, he was one of the last of the monks to leave his old monastery, marrying a former nun, by whom he fathered six children. Wittenberg was where the Reformation happened.

Luther becomes interesting only when he writes. His publications began in 1516 with an edition of sermons, written two centuries previously (he attributed them to the German mystic Johann Tauler), on how to be in communion with God and live a good life. It was known as the German Theology. Luther’s preface praised the work, which would have an impact on those who wanted to take the Protestant Reformation further and faster than he did. Research papers followed in 1517: the Disputation against Scholastic Theology (August) and the Ninety-Five Theses, or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (October) – the latter having a fair claim to being the shortest and most explosive academic article ever written. A century later, it was commemorated by a procession culminating at the castle church in Wittenberg. An anniversary engraving in 1617 shows Luther with a quill pen inscribing his theses on the door of the church. The nib is depicted going straight through Pope Leo X, in one ear and out of the other, and knocking off his tiara. Words, it implied, had deadly truth, the power to overturn thrones.

That, roughly speaking, was the story. In April 1518, Luther’s Heidelberg Disputations, presented before the chapter of his order, won him a following in the Rhineland. His published sermons began – those on Indulgences (more popular than the Ninety-Five Theses), on Christ’s Passion, on Death, on Work and on Marriage all appeared before 1520, the year when Luther defined what he stood for. Works poured out – something every two weeks, according to one calculation. The Reformation began as an academic and literary event.

A map of Wittenberg in 1546, the year of Luther’s death, depicts a walled town with about ten streets and three gates. It was small, and almost everything on the map had been newly founded or rebuilt. At the South Gate stood the largest house in town, constructed in 1512 for the court artist and pharmacist Lucas Cranach. To the West Gate was the castle which holds the key to what made Wittenberg significant. In 1485, Saxony had been divided between two brothers – Ernst and Albrecht. ‘Ernestine Saxony’ retained the right as the Elector to vote at imperial Diets but lost the best bits (Leipzig, its university and castle) to Duke Albrecht. Ernst’s son Frederick the Wise ruled Electoral Saxony from 1486, and made Wittenberg his capital. He demolished the old castle and built a new one, including a library. The latter was supervised by Georg Spalatin, court chaplain and tutor to the Elector’s children, an intermediary between the Elector and the university.

The castle also had a new church, complete with a collection of relics. It dominated the town when it was completed in 1505. Frederick wanted to put his capital on the map. Turning it into a centre for devotion, learning and pilgrimage was a good way to do so. Part of that strategy involved establishing a new university to rival Leipzig’s. It opened its doors in 1502 and Frederick’s childhood friend and kinsman Johann von Staupitz was appointed dean of the theological faculty. The following year, Staupitz became vicar-general of Luther’s monastic house. It was new too, for the Augustinians had arrived only in 1502. Wittenberg was neither big enough nor old enough to have much by way of vested interests. Luther would be able to appoint like-minded faculty colleagues and, with the Elector’s backing, fashion its religious life as he thought best.

That new monastery was the point of departure for Luther’s spiritual journey. The monastic rule that he had entered, the sermons that he heard, the theology that he read, all taught that man was a sinner who needed redemption. How that redemption worked was discussed in abstractions among theologians who were divided into various ‘ways of thought’ (viae), partly reflecting their philosophical standpoint. Sins came in all shapes and sizes, but it was generally agreed that there were seven deadly ones. These went back to Adam’s disobedience. Humankind was the inheritor of that ‘original’ sin, and unable to ‘satisfy’ God’s righteous anger.

Fortunately God, whose power is absolute, was willing to commit himself (as the theologians of the Via Moderna saw it) to a covenant to bestow grace upon human beings, and limit his power within established channels. His ultimate covenant was to send his son, Jesus Christ, into the world, who, because he was both man and the son of God, could offer the necessary satisfaction on our behalf. That grace remained available through the channel of the Church, and the sacraments, particularly baptism, the Eucharist and penance. Together, these offered the Christian congruent merit which worked alongside his own penitence, though whether attrition, a fear of the consequences of sin, was worth much in God’s eyes, or whether (in time) it might lead to contrition (true penitence), and whether perfect contrition could ever exist were matters of debate. Habitual grace was, they all agreed, a supernatural gift which, when received into the soul, united the Christian with Christ, put things right with God, and taught him a new ‘habit’, or disposition to be a virtuous human being. Such grace was sufficient because it gave him the power to obey God, but it was not automatically efficacious since that depended on its being put into practice in his life, by doing ‘what lies within his powers’. To enjoy a state of grace involved a perpetual effort, one in which penance, self-denial and self-sacrifice were the key. Detachment from the world’s temptations, accompanied by monastic vows, was a good start on that long road. The Augustinian Hermits in Wittenberg took it seriously.

Luther, by his own account, was a good monk. But it did not work. In 1518, Luther described his temptations (Anfechtungen), dark nights of the soul ‘so intense, so infernal, that no language, no pen, could possibly delineate them’. In 1533, he recalled how his mother had dealt with being pestered by a neighbouring witch. On other occasions, he describes how he was visited by the Devil in the monastery. Luther’s responses were often scatological: ‘But, if that is not enough for you, Devil, I have also shit and pissed; wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite.’ In a sermon before the chapter of the Augustinian Order in May 1515, Luther’s theme was that of slander and backbiting, a problem in monastic life. ‘A slanderer,’ he said, ‘does nothing but ruminate among the shit of others . . . That is why his droppings stink most, surpassed only by the Devil’s.’ The Devil, in other words, was in the monastery, in our mouths, everywhere. Each glimpse of Luther’s earlier life seems a calculated reminder that salvation was not an academic matter, but a question of flesh and blood, life and death.

In Luther’s various accounts, remembered in a way that confuses past and present, Staupitz, the Superior of his order and (it would seem) his spiritual director, pointed the way forward. In one encounter, Luther records him saying that when he was tempted to dwell too much on God’s righteousness, he should instead think about the wounds of Christ, focus on the Man of Sorrows. It was Staupitz who taught Luther to think of repentance in terms of a relationship with a merciful God, rather than as a state of being judged by an omnipotent one. The point was not to discover how we are saved. We already were. The question was how, in that relationship, we trusted God.

Luther reacted selectively and comparatively to what he read. Traces of what he had been taught reappeared in unexpected guises as his thinking evolved. He became convinced that the only worthwhile theology was one that could make sense of the world and its complexity. In the process, scholastic theology was dispensed with. By 1517, Luther was an outspoken critic of its empty categories. Yet some of its influence remained with him, especially the Via Moderna emphasis on the dichotomy between the sovereignty of God and the sinfulness of man. Dichotomies remained essential in Luther’s thought, often expressed as word-pairs, paradoxes through which one should understand the ways in which humans relate to one another and towards God. In those relationships, always dynamic, we are contradictory bundles of potentials and desires, free and bound at the same time, sinners and forgiven of our sins, capable of the uttermost depravity but (through God’s grace) able to go on loving and be loved. Luther’s paradoxes perplexed his contemporaries; Erasmus said he would not go to the stake for any of them.

In the place of scholastic thinking came an intensive reading of the Bible, an investment in learning Greek and Hebrew, and the purchase of Erasmus’s 1516 edition of the New Testament. Luther concentrated on the Pauline epistles in the New Testament and the Psalms in the Old Testament, using the commentary techniques that were the current method of lecturing to students to clarify his reading of the essential meaning of the text in question. In the process, something happened to his idea of what God was saying. Human speech-acts were not up to much. True, they were the basis of society (oaths, promises, pardons) and embraced the important things in life. Yet we say things and do not mean them. We promise them and do not carry them out. The Bible, however, contained God’s promises and he is totally trustworthy. We do not have to hold the text this way or that, elaborate on it, turn it into a law or create a metaphysic around it. The sign is the reality, and God is simply ready and waiting for the faith which acknowledges that. With that faith, said Luther, you have something stronger than any piece of paper, any letter of pardon, any intellectually constructed paradigm. You can hold that promise up to God, no matter what happens. The ‘Indulgences Affair’ and what followed turned this insight into something much sharper-edged and destructive: ‘Scripture alone’ (sola Scriptura), the assertion that Scripture is the bedrock test for what constitutes God’s truth.

Luther found the essence in a text from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ch. 1, v. 17 (itself referring back to the Old Testament): ‘For therein is the justice of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, The just shall live by faith.’ In his preface to the Latin edition of his complete works, published in 1545, Luther said that it was only when he began to lecture on the Psalms for a second round in 1519 that he construed what this passage meant; that God’s righteousness was not that of a judge dispensing justice to sinners but that of a merciful father who preferred equity to justice, who wants faith alone, and wants us to live spiritually in return. ‘I felt myself absolutely reborn,’ he wrote, ‘as though I had entered into the open gates of paradise itself.’ But that was in 1519, two years into the Indulgences Affair. Had he, as many Luther scholars surmise, come to it much earlier, perhaps in 1513, when he first started lecturing, or in 1515, when he first tackled Romans?

Luther’s lecture notes take us only so far in unravelling this puzzle. We can see what he chose to comment on, and who he was reading: St Bernard of Clairvaux, Jean Gerson, Gabriel Biel, Johann Tauler, Augustine of Hippo. The latter was of singular importance, the fourth-century theologian who had done most to convince the Christian Church that human beings after the Fall were not worth saving and that God’s decision as to who should be redeemed was (to us humans) entirely arbitrary. He would save those whom he chose, making use of whatever slight capacity we might have to turn towards him, gradually transforming us by his grace. For some theologians, Luther’s way was merely that of Augustinianism reborn – and, since Augustine had never been neglected in the Middle Ages, Luther’s novelty becomes a damp squib. But in practice Luther taught something different. We are saved, he said, by Christ’s righteousness. Only faith (sola fide), itself a gift from God, can take hold of this righteousness. That faith comes to us in an instant, not little by little. Through it, we are in a dynamic relationship with God. It is, said Luther in 1522, a ‘divine work’ in us.

Only perhaps quite late on, after the initial attacks on him in the Indulgences Affair, did Luther’s new thinking take full shape in his mind. He called it his ‘theology of the cross’ and he expounded it at the meeting of the Augustinian Order in Heidelberg in April 1518, among his own brethren. One Dominican who heard him, Martin Bucer (whose subsequent contribution as a reformer in the Rhineland and England was considerable), was transfixed by what Luther said. ‘A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.’ He went on to explain that a God of revelation tells us from on high how to behave and what to do. That is the theology of glory and it inevitably defines ‘goodness’ by what God says we should do and say. By contrast, a loving God is one who becomes weak and foolish to save people, present in the world, but ‘hidden in suffering’. On another occasion, he expounded Exodus Ch. 33 where Moses seeks the glory of the Lord, but sees only his backside. For Luther, that is the point. No one can see God face to face and live, so God reveals himself in the most unlikely ways and places. He is hidden, but active in all the messiness of our lives. Luther re-routed theology away from the university and study and towards the hospital, the bedroom, the workplace. He said that we were all our own theologians (‘the priesthood of all creation’). If that had been carried through, the Reformation would have changed Christianity out of all recognition.

BATTLES OF THE BOOKS

Luther’s visit to Heidelberg was his first direct contact with the literate world of the Rhineland humanists. That world served as an echo-chamber for the ‘Luther Affair’. While Luther was finding the Gospel in his way at Wittenberg, a community of Bible scholars was finding it in theirs. The centres were in Basel, Zürich and Strasbourg. Basel was the great university city where Erasmus completed work on his New Testament in 1515, the year Wolfgang Capito became cathedral preacher, professor and Erasmus’s assistant. Also in 1515, Johannes Oecolampadius (the Greek for ‘little lamp’, his original name in German being Johannes Huszgen) arrived in Basel at the invitation of Erasmus’s printer, Johann Froben. Oecolampadius helped Erasmus finish the notes and commentary to his New Testament. At around the same time, Huldrych Zwingli visited Basel to meet that ‘most learned of all scholars’ (Erasmus), purchasing the New Testament and settling down to learn Greek to master it. Four years later, Zwingli would mount the pulpit at the Great Minster of Zürich, capital of the large, easterly Swiss canton. Eight years on, Capito took up his post as provost of the collegiate church of St Thomas in Strasbourg, being joined there by Martin Bucer, Caspar Hedio – another Basel graduate – and Matthias Zell. These were the movers and shakers of the upper Rhineland Reformation.

Erasmus’s New Testament became three volumes in one. He had begun with the idea of an aid to help with Bible-reading in the form of scholarly notes. He hated the old commentaries, wanting instead to have notes that took one back to what the words actually meant. As he wrote, however, he realized that the Vulgate Latin translation was not up to the mark. He needed to provide a new one to explain the notes. But then, in order to justify his own translation, he had to give the Greek original. The eventual volume was little short of 1,000 pages in length. Three volumes needed three prefaces. The first was an ‘encouragement to the devout reader’. Within the pages of this book, said Erasmus, lay Christian truth, ‘the philosophy of Christ’. You did not need to be a professor or a theologian to discover it; you simply had to be a receptive, pious reader (who knew Latin and Greek . . . ). How you did that was the subject of the second preface (‘On Method’). It was a matter of being in the right frame of mind and aware of the communicative power of language. The third preface was an ‘Apology’, anticipating his critics. Finding the Vulgate wrong in over a thousand places, he expected an avalanche of criticism, so he dedicated his work to Pope Leo X to secure protection in high places.

The onslaught duly happened, not least because Erasmus had worked fast. A rival edition had been published in Spain at Alcalá for Cardinal Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo, in January 1514, and Froben hoped to steal a march on it by securing an imperial privilege for Erasmus’s version. Meanwhile, another battle of the books also raged in the Rhineland. The scholar at its heart was Johann Reuchlin, known as ‘Capnion’ (the Greek for ‘puff of smoke’, or Reuchlein). Reuchlin had less of the wit, and none of the presentational flair, of Erasmus, but he had linguistic and philological skills. By 1515, he was northern Europe’s leading Hebrew scholar.

Reuchlin was working on a great treatise on the Kabbalah (De arte cabbalistica) that came out in 1517. That was when he was not fending off critics. Prominent among the latter was a Jew from Nuremberg who had converted and been baptized a Christian at Cologne in 1504: Johannes Pfefferkorn. He made his name with anti-Semitic publications, beginning with The Mirror of the Jews. The accusations were familiar and nasty (ritual slaughter, child murder, obstinate heresy), and campaigns against Jews had begun to have an impact in Germany. Jews had been expelled from Austria in 1469 and from Nuremberg in 1498, and were menaced in Bavaria, from where they were expelled in 1519. The resulting displaced Jewish communities created racial and religious tensions which Pfefferkorn’s ‘mirror’ reflected and magnified. In 1509, Pfefferkorn campaigned to confiscate Jewish books, and Reuchlin prepared a report the following year that dismissed both the legality and the substance of the case. He became a marked man, his work condemned by theologians at Cologne and Paris, his writings banned by the emperor and burned in public, he himself forced to appear before the Inquisition at Mainz. In 1515, his case was pending an appeal to Rome when Ulrich von Hutten’s Letters of Obscure Men appeared. Under the guise of letters written in dog-Latin by invented nonentities to one of Pfefferkorn’s supporters, Hutten (and friends – it was a group effort) made fun of Reuchlin’s enemies, rubbished old-fashioned lecturers and monks, and painted a ribald picture of the papal court and its exploitation of the Germans. The literate world queued up to enjoy the controversy and to take sides. The ‘Reuchlin Affair’ was an opening skirmish in a larger battle of the books which turned into the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation.

THE LUTHER AFFAIR

Luther’s insights might have remained just that. That they did not do so was one of the unintended consequences of what happened between 1517 and 1521. The Luther Affair has been called ‘an accidental revolution’ but it was an accident waiting to happen. The issue on which it began – indulgences – was not new. In this instance, the good cause in question was the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It had been begun seven decades ago and was unfinished. Pope Leo X recognized the power of a symbol (and a symbol of power) and put his stamp on the project. He turned to indulgences to finance it. But the receipts came in slowly, and some rulers blocked the initiative.

In the case of the young Hohenzollern Albrecht of Brandenburg, things were different. At the age of twenty-three, he was nominated archbishop of Mainz, prince-archbishop of Magdeburg and acting bishop of Halberstadt, making him an Elector of the empire, its Arch-Chancellor and a prince in his own right. But he needed a papal dispensation for which Rome charged a fee. Here was the basis of a deal. Albrecht agreed to take charge of the sale of the indulgences in Germany for eight years, half of the proceeds going to fund the reconstruction of St Peter’s and the other half to the merchants who loaned Albrecht the money for his dispensation. The operation was entrusted to a Dominican, Johann Tetzel, who had fifteen years of experience in the salvation-marketing business. Electoral Saxony, however, was one of the places where indulgence-selling was forbidden, and the Hohenzollerns were no friends of the Wettins, the house of the Saxon Elector. But Tetzel preached at Jüterborg, just over the Saxon frontier, and attracted a popular hearing.

Luther’s response was to write a letter to his archbishop – Albrecht of Brandenburg – enclosing the Ninety-Five Theses, short and provocative, on what he saw as the abuse of indulgences. Whether the theses were ever pinned to the door of Wittenberg cathedral on 31 October 1517, as Melanchthon asserted in his funeral sermon for Luther, is a matter of doubt. Luther did not want to cause the Elector of Saxony political embarrassment, and they were not intended as a clarion call to Germany. Albrecht did what was expected of him: he sent them to the University of Mainz for examination, and forwarded them to Rome. Meanwhile, a copy was printed without Luther’s authorization and translated into German. The Dominicans and others leapt to Tetzel’s defence. The result was another battle of the books.

For Luther the issues were about grace and salvation. For his opponents, they were about papal authority. Books and pamphlets invited educated opinion in Germany to take sides. Opinions on Church reform ran high in advance of the 1518 Augsburg Diet. In Rome, Pope Leo X could have sat it out. But the Letters of Obscure Men (condemned to be burned by a papal bull in 1517), and Erasmus’s withering denunciation of the warrior Pope Leo in his Complaint of Peace, published in Strasbourg that same year, were disturbingly personal. The Letters were published anonymously and Erasmus had friends in high places. They, for the present, were untouchable. Luther, on the other hand, was an obscure Augustinian monk in Saxony. Elector Frederick could surely be won over. Saxony was not that far from Prague, where the scars of Hussite heresy had still not healed. Why not make Luther into an example, a shot across the bows to others about the reality of papal authority? So the heresy process, launched against Luther by the Dominicans, was geared up, and he was summoned to Rome in August 1518.

Leo X was not entirely wrong. But he neglected two interlinked elements that proved critical. He underestimated Elector Frederick’s determination to protect Luther, and he misinterpreted the gathering movement in Luther’s favour. Behind Frederick’s obstinacy lay a prince with a sense of his responsibility as an Elector of the German empire. In addition, in January 1519, the balance of political forces in Germany changed with the death of Emperor Maximilian I. In the electoral campaign that followed, Frederick’s vote, one of seven, was critical. Wanting to back neither of the two front-runners (Francis I and Charles V), the papacy initially put its weight behind an indigenous candidate: Frederick himself. The heresy process against Luther was suspended – a crucial period for the emergence of a wider basis of support for him.

Lutheran solidarity lay initially in predictable places – Wittenberg University and the brethren of his order, spoiling for a fight with the Dominicans. But solidarity also emerged from less likely quarters – among the independent knights of the empire, for example, one of whom offered to raise an army in support of the Luther cause. It coalesced, too, among the educated opinion that had lined up behind Reuchlin. German resentment at the cultural arrogance and exploitation of Italians was a case which made itself, unlike one that defended the privileges and culture of the Jews. Hutten, who was initially inclined to dismiss the Indulgences Affair as a squabble, understood in the wake of Luther’s disputation with Eck at Leipzig in July 1519 that it furnished an occasion to throw mud at a Church which failed to reform. At the Diet of Augsburg (August 1518) the papal envoy, Tommaso de Vio (Cardinal Cajetan), general of the Dominican Order, struggled against the rising tide. By the next Diet (Worms, April 1521), his successor was submerged: ‘All Germany is in open revolt. Nine-tenths cry out “Luther!” And the remaining tenth . . . cry “Death to the Roman Curia!”’

Luther never underestimated his opponents. Their skill was to shift the terms of the debate away from salvation and towards authority. First with Cajetan at Augsburg, and then with Johann Eck, Luther had to confront issues which had not been his preoccupations up to that date. Eck was vice-chancellor of Ingolstadt University and at the height of his powers. In yet another controversy (Eck’s Obelisks versus Luther’s Asterisks), and then in debate at Leipzig in July 1519, Luther found himself fighting on a much broader terrain, rejecting the claims implicit in canon law that the bishop of Rome was head of the Church by divine right, asserting that councils of the Church could, and had, made mistakes, and accepting that many of the beliefs of Hus were ‘most Christian and evangelical’. In place of councils, canon law and church fathers, he asserted the primacy of Scripture over all other forms of authority.

Luther’s annus mirabilis was 1520. ‘The time for silence is over and the time for speech has come,’ he wrote in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, one of three famous manifestos of that year. For the first time he addressed the broader political question of Church and imperial reform as conceived at the German Diets. Through the German nobility he appealed to the new emperor himself, that they should ‘do their Christian duty and defend the Church against the Pope and see to it that a general council was summoned to reform the Church and the Christian estate’. At the same time he appealed to a ‘nation’ that was more than the nobility to liberate Germany from Rome’s tyranny and create a true godly order. In The Freedom of a Christian, Luther’s message was that reform and reconciliation with the Roman Church were no longer important. What mattered was how the Christian, unable to earn merit through good works, could lead a Christian life. Luther’s answer was in a paradox. We were both free and unfree. We were already free from ‘clerical tyranny . . . the ecclesiastical prison’ because we were in a direct relationship with God. Our bondage was that this freedom came with responsibilities as a Christian to carry out God’s love in the world. For the present, Luther sidestepped what this might mean for our obedience to rulers and the Church.

By the time of the publication of The Freedom of a Christian, Luther’s reconciliation with the Roman Church was a lost cause. His writings had been condemned by universities in Cologne and Louvain. The papal bull (Exsurge Domine) threatening him (and Hutten) with excommunication unless they recanted was issued on 15 June 1520. Luther burned it along with an assortment of books by his opponents, a reply to a parallel burning of his own books at Leipzig. The scene was set for the ‘secular arm’ to apply the bull at the imperial Diet of Worms, where Luther was summoned to appear. Imperial advisers sought ways of preventing the Luther Affair from dominating the discussions of Church reform. The Estates refused to contemplate the imposition of a papal ban in German lands before the individuals affected had a chance to be heard and to answer the charges. Neither side got what they wanted, although in the eventual compromise the implication was that it was for the German Diet to determine how problems affecting the Church and doctrine in Germany should be handled. Luther was given imperial protection to travel to Worms – a journey which turned into a triumphant cavalcade. Before the young Emperor Charles V in person, Luther’s books were stacked up, their titles read out. Luther was invited to acknowledge them, and whether he stood by the views expressed in them. In his reply he divided them into three categories. His works on faith and morals were acknowledged even by his enemies. To renounce those would be to renounce Christendom itself. Those on the evils of the Church and the corruption of the papacy concerned how Christendom was governed. To deny them would be to deny any remedy to Christendom itself. Only in the case of the third category, polemics directed at his critics, did he concede that he might have written with more charity. Urged to give a plain answer, his response was that he would not recant unless proved wrong by Scripture, because his conscience was ‘captive to the word of God’. Printed versions of his statement added the evocative words: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’

THE PROCESSES OF REFORMATION

The Reformation began in German and Swiss lands. In the explosive decade of the 1520s it meant different things to different people, spreading through multiple media. It made new alliances across social groups and brought fresh political players into action. The exodus of monks and nuns from monasteries, the controversies raised by clerical marriages, and the polemic against ‘priests’ whores’ (concubines) imbued the early Reformation with a sense of liberation, a sizzling sexual energy which the disturbing nudes of the Wittenberg painter Lucas Cranach, Luther’s long-standing friend and supporter, reflected. That the Reformation managed to coalesce around an emerging set of churches and doctrines towards 1530 was an achievement. But it came at a cost. Coherence was achieved by defining a mainstream ‘magisterial’ Reformation and excluding those who failed to conform. Those tensions led, by the end of the decade, to rifts over how churches should be organized and governed, over the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and one large, unbridgeable rift over the Eucharist.

New players emerged in part because those who might have been expected to take a lead in determining what happened did not do so. Charles V left the Reich immediately after the Diet of Worms and returned only a decade later, in 1530. From a distance, his interventions served merely to frustrate the efforts of the German Estates to resolve the differences through a national council of the Church. At the Diet of Worms, Charles nominated his brother Ferdinand as regent of the empire. But Ferdinand had a complicated relationship with his brother. As co-heir with Charles to the dynastic inheritance of Maximilan I he expected to be granted a substantial inheritance and to be elected king in Bohemia and king of the Romans. But Charles was sensitive to the charge that the Habsburgs were trying to take over the empire by stealth. At Worms, he agreed to settle upon Ferdinand the five Austrian duchies. Then, in February 1522, he ceded to him the Tyrol, the Vorlande in Swabia and the duchy of Württemberg, recently occupied by the Swabian League and governed temporarily by the Habsburgs. The last part of this agreement was kept secret, and when it became public knowledge in 1525, it raised doubts about Habsburg intentions in the Reich. Meanwhile, Ferdinand consolidated his authority in Austria and overcame his brother’s reluctance to his election to the Bohemian throne in 1526. The Wittelsbach Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria launched his rival candidature with international support. Ferdinand needed the support of the Electors and the acquiescence of the Estates to win through and he was prepared to shelve the Lutheran problem. Ferdinand inherited parts of Hungary, and thereafter his ability to lead the empire was compromised further by the Ottoman threat.

By the terms of his Capitulation, Charles agreed to set up a Governing Council. This new body was one in which the Estates had a determining part, but it had to collaborate with Ferdinand. That proved difficult. Attempts to carry forward the imperial reform programme by instigating a ‘Common Penny’ imperial tax to fund military expenditures failed. As the Governing Council faltered so the leadership of the empire fell back upon the Estates. But they were at sixes and sevens over how to respond to the Lutheran Reformation. Even their execution of the Edict of Worms was problematic. Elector Frederick secured an exemption from having to carry it out in his own lands. Only in Habsburg territories, Albertine Saxony, Bavaria and Brunswick was any attempt made to enforce it. The rest simply ignored it. The efforts, spearheaded by a group of imperial cities (Strasbourg, Ulm and Nuremberg), to lay the groundwork for a national council of the Church to meet at Speyer in 1524 collapsed as their own unity dissolved, one of a series of fractures in the German empire of which Lutheranism became both the cause and ultimately the beneficiary.

Among the new players on the political scene, Luther was an ambiguous figure: a non-political national hero. On his journey back from Worms he was taken out of circulation for his own safety by the Saxon Elector and kept in prison for ten months at the Wartburg castle. The result was an outpouring of writings – on the sacraments, monastic vows, the Psalms and a translation of the New Testament into German. But Luther emerged in 1522 with no desire to put himself at the head of a popular movement or to engage with the imperial cities in their plans for a national council. He optimistically expected the dissemination of the word alone to destroy ‘the swarming vermin of the Papal regime’. His main concerns were to encourage Christians to reform their own communities without being hindered by the princes. The latter he despised as ‘generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth’ from whom ‘one must constantly expect the worst’.

Yet, without willing it, Luther became a touchstone of Reformation. At the university in Wittenberg, among the officials of the Saxon Electorate, the humanists of the Rhineland and in southern German cities, he had supporters. Among the members of his own Augustinian Order, as well as more widely among the preaching clergy, his message vibrated outwards. The processes of the Protestant Reformation are laid out in the printed pamphlets (Flugschriften) which accompanied its first decade in German-speaking lands. Produced in handy formats and distributed on a regional basis, they sold into a competitive market. More than half of them were only eight pages long and cost a sixth of the daily wage of an artisan apprentice. Woodcuts were used to illustrate the title-page on about three quarters of them. The variety of literary forms testified to their being derived from other means of communication – sermons, letters, poems, songs, prayers, complaints and exhortations. Although religious themes predominated, other subjects impinged too – the war against the Turks, the uprising of the commons, miraculous signs and prophecies, interest and usury. Over 10,000 pamphlet titles are known to have been published between 1500 and 1530, but the vast majority of them appeared in the decade between 1517 and 1527, and most of them were evangelical. There were possibly about 3 million pamphlet copies in circulation between 1518 and 1525. For a population of 12 million, that figure sounds modest; but in relation to those who could read it was impressive. Despite the impact of the Reformation elsewhere in Europe nowhere experienced this intensity of printed output. Only perhaps in Geneva in the 1550s and 60s would printing and the Reformation converge on the same scale.

Pamphlets were not the sole, or even the most important, means of evangelical persuasion. The early evangelical preachers were perhaps the most effective communicators of all. They dramatized the moment, speaking to audiences of this as a ‘golden and joyous’ time, when the ‘gospel has been set free’ to ‘the whole world’, which had previously been ‘denied Christ’. God himself was now at work, and the Last Judgment and the Kingdom were close at hand. They recounted their own experience of discovering ‘evangelical Christian truth’, and invited an active response. The true Church, they implied, lay in the community of the faithful. The Gospel did not belong to the priests. Laymen (and laywomen) were equal to, or even superior to, priests in faith.

Luther offered no Reformation blueprint. His invitation to local Christian congregations to work it out for themselves called other actors into play and, in the evangelical movement of the 1520s, they grafted his message onto their own concerns and objectives. The Reformation in Wittenberg was an early indication of how divisive that could be. With Luther locked away in the Wartburg, the movement lay in the hands of his university colleagues. One of them, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, intoxicated by his independent reading of St Augustine and then by Luther’s charisma abandoned his initial reserve. In December, students and others broke into the parish church, threw out the Mass books and pulled down the altar. They then forced their way into the city council, demanding an end to the Mass. In response Karlstadt inaugurated a ‘Christian city of Wittenberg’. He encouraged the monks and nuns to leave their cloisters and, on Boxing Day 1521, announced his own engagement to a fifteen-year-old girl. The Mass should be replaced by something that involved ordinary people. The latter made their presence felt. Contingents of weavers – Luther later dismissed them as ‘dreamers’ (Schwärmer) – made their way to Wittenberg, convinced that, as he had seemed to say, God was on their side. They were unimpressed by the idea that the Eucharist was a miracle. The bread and wine were just symbols (‘pictures’). To believe anything else was simply ‘idolatry’. On that subject, Karlstadt had incendiary things to say. In On the Removal of Images (1522), he denied that images were the books of the poor. He urged his readers to destroy images before they destroyed themselves.

All this happened to Elector Frederick’s anger and Luther’s consternation. The latter was released from the Wartburg castle and returned to preach a week of sermons. Our world within, he began, is ours, and no one else’s. None of us can die for another, and if we set ourselves up as judges over one another, Wittenberg will become another Capernaum. The message of Christian freedom was that we should make what changes were necessary but not constrain people’s consciences by forcing the pace. Monks and nuns should leave their communities and marry if their consciences dictated it. The only harm images ever did anyone was in their veneration. God told Moses not to worship them. He did not say: ‘tear them down’. The good people of Wittenberg had fallen under malign influence. He rebuked them for being seduced by false prophets.

Defining the issues, pace and authority to undertake change dominated the early Reformation. They were matters which Luther thought should be decided locally. When Leisnig, a town in Electoral Saxony, consulted him in 1523 on how to proceed, he told them to place the church and its parish coffer in the hands of their own community. In 1524, the Franconian village of Wendelstein drafted Church ordinances and read them aloud to their new clergyman, reminding him that he was their ‘attendant and servant . . . [y]ou shall not order us; it is we shall order you’. At Zwickau, Elector Frederick’s ‘pearl’, his ‘little Venice’ and the largest town in the Electorate, the process was more confrontational. The town had changed with the discovery of silver on the Schneeberg, sharpening the contrasts between those who took advantage of its new wealth and those who could not. Hermann Muhlfort, the city treasurer, corruptly rode the boom, his accounts reflecting schemes for city hall improvements, street-paving, a new syphilis hospital, and the like. Also arriving in 1520, fresh from Wittenberg as another would-be Lutheran acolyte, was Thomas Müntzer. From the first, his sermons in the little church of Zwickau’s wool-weaving district attracted crowds with their anti-papal rhetoric. Then Zwickau’s notables grew nervous as violent incidents multiplied. Müntzer was accused of making common cause with ‘ordinary louts’, his ‘drinking companions’, who panted for ‘murder and blood’. These were the so-called ‘Zwickau Prophets’, people like Niclas Storch, a weaver from just outside the town. Storch, like Müntzer, taught that Scripture alone did not have the power to instruct people, and that one must be enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Among the residents of ‘God’s Lane’ (part of the weaving district), the Prophets were believed to have twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples. Gradually, by proscribing its leaders and reinforcing the authority of its church, Zwickau’s notables regained the upper hand, expelling the radicals.

Karlstadt, Müntzer and Storch took the message of the Holy Spirit elsewhere. Karlstadt went to Orlamünde, south of Jena. There he removed images from the church, refused to baptize children and interpreted the Eucharist as a memorial of Christ’s death. In 1524, he published his answer to Luther’s Wittenberg sermons in his pamphlet On Going Slowly. ‘If you see a small child with a sharp knife, you do not say “let him keep it, for brotherly love.” You take it from him lest he wound or kill himself.’ Immersing himself in the writings of late-medieval mystics, he developed a theology of spiritual regeneration in which the soul must be emptied by abandoning itself to God before being circumcised (metaphorically) and transformed into a new man and spiritual rebirth through the Holy Spirit. Baptism and the Eucharist were signs of that regeneration having taken place. Small children could not possibly experience such a rebirth, so infant baptism was not only unbiblical but impracticable. The bread and wine were symbols, since no one could be expected to believe that Christ’s body was somehow everywhere. Luther retorted that Karlstadt had swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all.

The Zürich Reformation took place in stages and it was not until three years later that the Mass was abolished. But already in a sermon preached in September 1523, Zwingli’s friend Leo Jud pointed out that Orthodox and western Christianity numbered the Ten Commandments differently. Orthodox Christianity had followed Judaism in making the ‘graven image’ commandment separate and more prominent. Western Christianity had softened it by subordinating it to the first commandment. By the time Jud published his text, Zürich had begun to put this ban on idolatry into practice, including music as a form of aural idolatry. Zwingli’s notion of the Eucharist evolved in tandem with this detachment from all that could be ‘embodied’ in a sign. In the late summer of 1525 he published a version of a letter originally written by Cornelis Hoen, a jurist and member of the provincial council of Holland, in 1521. According to Hoen, the words of institution (‘This is my Body’ . . .) should be taken symbolically. Zwingli’s adoption of that ‘symbolic’ view turned radical Sacramentarian opinions into a mainstream and divisive issue.

That was also the pattern of Reformation in Bern. In 1523, the patricians of Bern required its preacher Berthold Haller to teach only what was to be found in Scripture. In 1525, the city council abolished indulgences, clerical dues, and the fiscal and legal privileges of the clergy. The magistrates took over the exclusive rights to appoint and dismiss the clergy in the canton. In the following year, after a rural revolt Haller found himself at the head of a popular movement in Bern whose influence upon elections to the city council in 1527 tipped the balance in the local oligarchy in favour of evangelical change. Priests were allowed to marry, Masses for the souls of the dead were abandoned, and a public disputation was organized in January 1528 whose outcome determined a Reformation in Bern along the lines of that in Zürich.

The distinctiveness of Zürich’s Reformation was already apparent by the time of Zwingli’s death in battle at Kappel am Albis on 11 October 1531, part of Zürich’s by then bitter confrontation with Catholic neighbouring cantons and an avatar of the conflicts between states involving religion to come. His successor, Heinrich Bullinger, declared Zwingli its prophet and first martyr. The pattern of Zürich’s Reformation emerged as not only Sacramentarian, iconophobic and chromophobic, but harmonophobic as well. By then, its more radical fringe had become identifiable as those who refused infant baptism (‘Catabaptists’, Zwingli called them; ‘Anabaptists’ to us). Zwingli failed to convince them otherwise and they were arrested by the magistrates and prosecuted under an ordinance introduced in 1526, threatening them with drowning. The first to be convicted was Felix Manz, the illegitimate son of a cathedral canon in the city. Led to a boat on the river Limmat on the afternoon of 7 January 1527, he was thrown into the water, his hands and feet bound to a pole. Most of the rest fled, creating the first of succeeding Anabaptist diasporas.

Zürich’s Reformation exercised an influence not only in Bern but beyond the Swiss cantons in southern Germany, across Lake Constance to the tributaries of the Danube and the Rhine. That was where most of the imperial cities lay, eighteen in the upper Rhine alone, thirty in Swabia. It was also the heartland of the Holy Roman Empire, where the majority of its Diets were held. Its leading cities were Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg and Ulm, flanked by a second rank of middling towns (Worms, Constance, Heilbronn and Nördlingen). ‘Turning Swiss’ was what the nobility told the emperor was happening all about them, an extension of the movement in the Grey Leagues that had once led to the Swiss secession from the empire, still a living memory. The allure of Swiss confederacy influenced the Reformation in southern German-speaking lands through the formation of Christian Federations.

But the empire’s southern cities discovered that Zürich’s Reformation was problematic. Their magistrates had to contend with the authority of the emperor and imperial institutions. Nuremberg, for example (the biggest city in southern Germany), hosted the Imperial Supreme Court and housed the crown jewels of the empire. Their magistrates had to balance pressure from below and within their number to carry out religious change with influence from above and within the city from conservatives. Ordinances in 1521 and 1522 invited Protestant preachers to the city and restricted alms-giving. Parts of the city became openly Lutheran. By 1524, however, the authorities were nervous – not least because their city was threatened with a papal interdict and with imperial pressure, and peasants were refusing to pay tithes. Preachers were told to lay off their sermons, printers were restricted. When representatives from the emperor ordered them to end the city’s evangelism at the Diet of Nuremberg that year, however, it was too late. Ordinances on baptism were announced and the Reformed Mass introduced on 1 June 1524.

In southwest Germany, the Protestant Reformation engaged other political players and social coalitions. The military uprising of imperial knights in 1522–3 was inspired by Luther and its leaders were evangelicals. The castle of Franz von Sickingen at Ebernburg (near Karlsruhe) became a centre for evangelical printing and the third place (after Wittenberg and Nuremberg) to host an evangelical Reformation. Sickingen also enjoyed the adherence of Hutten, whom he had met during the Swabian League’s military engagement against Duke Ulrich of Württemberg in 1519. Hutten supported Sickingen as the national movement’s leader which Luther refused to be. Between them they hoped to turn the disaffections of imperial knights and lesser nobles into a military force that would ‘create an opening for the Gospel’ in the middle Rhine. Noble feuds had encouraged the growth of noble leagues in Swabia and the Wetterau counties. In August 1522, about 600 Rhineland knights met at Landau and swore to a ‘fraternal’ association under Sickingen’s leadership. He then launched a feud against the Elector-archbishop of Trier. But the general uprising Sickingen hoped for failed to materialize. He did not capture Trier; instead, he was killed in May 1523 when his own fortress at Burg Nanstein in the Landstuhl was besieged. Hutten fled to an island in the Zürichsee, where he died of syphilis in August 1523. The Estates prevented the failure of the Knights’ Revolt from threatening their own destiny as an order within the empire.

The Great Peasant War of 1524–6 was a more complex phenomenon, and on a larger scale. It brought to a climax the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the early German Reformation. A climactic happening had been predicted by astrologers. In February 1524, the planetary conjunction in the sign of Pisces was the presage for a world-changing event, perhaps a new Flood. About fifty printed works have survived from the year 1523, predicting a disaster, some depicting it as a popular uprising. Some of the Alsace rebels claimed that they had merely been the agent of God’s will as written in the stars.

For heuristic purposes, the Peasant War is often parcelled up as the ‘rural Reformation’, the counterpart of the ‘urban Reformation’, although in reality the divide is an artificial one. Luther’s message had an impact beyond urban landscapes. The nobility acted as a conduit for evangelical ideas. Parts of Luther’s message went down well in the countryside, where there were clerical lands, rights and monastic presence. The idea that Church wealth had been acquired by false pretences took root. Zwingli’s influence was still clearer. By teaching that the Gospels were the touchstone of Reformation, he opened the door to questioning tithes, for where was their biblical justification? In 1523, the refusal to pay tithes began in the Rhineland and Franconia and spread southwards. In Zürich, tithe resistance became the signature of those impatient with slow change, starting around Witikon and Zollikon, villages just up from the lake and supported by Wilhelm Reublin, later one of the most articulate Anabaptists.

To call it a Peasant War hardly captures the flavour of this exceptionally widespread movement of rural commoners and townspeople, seeking redress for grievances that were not new from an empire which in their eyes manipulated a contrived (Roman) law against their customary rights and privileges. The means at their disposal were numerous: mass political assemblies, petitions and ‘articles’ setting out their grievances, boycotts of tithes and other dues, ransacking of monastic and noble properties. Only in the later stages did peasant bands congregate into ‘armies’. The evolution of this variegated outbreak of people-power is hard to describe because it differed from region to region and its outcomes were dependent on local circumstances. In the Black Forest, the wealthy abbey of St Blasien and the counties of Lupfen and Stühlingen became the focus of tithe-strikes in the summer of 1524. Joining the upswing was Waldshut, a small town on the Rhine above Basel with a radical pastor, Balthasar Hubmaier.

As the movement spread into Upper Swabia, it became more overtly evangelical. Large bands of peasants assembled in a carnival atmosphere on the eve of Lent in February 1525. Their leaders made common cause with the newly appointed preacher in the small imperial city of Memmingen, Christoph Schappeler. Memmingen had just emerged from a conflict with the bishop of Augsburg over its rights to appoint its own preacher. The magistrates supported Schappeler both because of their own growing evangelical convictions and in response to guild pressure. One of Schappeler’s adherents was a furrier, Sebastian Lotzer, an outspoken pamphleteer who preached the coming of the end of the world, interpreting his own awakening to the gospel as a sign of his prophetic power. The leaders of the peasants in the villages around Memmingen entered the city and either Schappeler or, more probably, Lotzer helped turn their grievances into the famous Twelve Articles of Memmingen, published in March 1525. Within a couple of months, these had been reprinted at least twenty-five times, a blueprint of complaints and a rallying cry.

Those articles offer an insight into how religious language and objectives were mixed with other grievances into a ‘gospel of social unrest’. One thread running through them was the sense of a common man (rather than peasant), independent of imposed authority and reliant upon a local community. Behind that community lay a notion of ‘divine law’, inscribed in traditional and communal justice. Trying to define the religion in this peasant resistance is rather like breaking down a compound into its chemical elements. It misses the point. Religion was the bond which gave impetus, dynamism and danger to the movement. The peasants certainly had political aspirations. In its most radical manifestations, the Peasants’ War articulated the right of the commons to depose ungodly rulers. A pamphlet entitled ‘To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry’, published in Nuremberg, imagined tyrant rulers being replaced by free communities of peasants living alongside urban communes and nobles and under the distant authority of a beneficent emperor. ‘Turning Swiss’ remained part of the dream of the Peasants’ War.

The radicalism of the Peasants’ War emerged in a different way in the last months of Thomas Müntzer’s life. After he was expelled from Zwickau in 1521, his nomadic existence took him to Prague and eventually to the small Saxon fortified enclave of Allstedt, where he led a radical Reformation and bitterly attacked Luther as the mandarin of Wittenberg. On 13 July 1524, he preached an incendiary sermon before Duke John, co-regent in Thuringian Saxony and heir apparent of his brother Frederick. Taking a text from the second chapter of Daniel, he interpreted Daniel’s dreams as a call to arms against lords who oppressed the gospel. Briefly establishing a league of about 500 citizens, he fled over the walls on the night of 7–8 August 1524, moving on to Mühlhausen in Thuringia, a small imperial city. There he fomented unrest, promoting an Eternal League of God, with whose support he deposed the city fathers (16 March 1525) and elected a new Eternal Council in their place. It was from there that he wrote apocalyptic letters to supporters, inviting them to rise up and smite their enemies.

On 10 May he set off with his contingent to support a peasant band assembled at Frankenhausen and, imagining himself a latter-day Gideon, led his followers to annihilation by princely troops just outside the city on 15 May. He himself was captured and was decapitated outside the walls twelve days later. It was not the end of the Peasants’ War but it was a defining month, not least because Luther published his tract Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. Partly in response to Müntzer’s call to arms, Luther condemned the peasants for ‘terrible sins’. The springtime of evangelism was over, and a divorce had occurred. For what we know today as the ‘radical Reformation’ was, in its origins, not a thing in itself but rather one half of a fraught relationship which now ended.

The dynamics of the early Reformation emphasized two realities. The first was that religious change was capable of creating an alternative vision of the political and social future. The second was that the Reformation set in train broad coalitions for that change. In the rural world, the coalitions were shortlived; in the urban world the trends were more varied. Where coalitions with a head of steam from artisans and householders were led by agitators prepared to outface the authorities, the movement for religious reform succeeded in displacing the existing regime. Where well organized coalitions met a less implacable regime, the result tended to be a negotiated settlement and a more gradual transition towards a reformed Church order in which the old guard embraced the new coalition and defused it. Where coalitions were weak and poorly led, and faced determined opposition, they failed. As the cycles of social and political urban ferment worked their way through, the outcome was a series of political and religious compromises.

By the later 1520s, the results were beginning to emerge. The magistrates in scores of imperial cities in Franconia, central Germany, the Rhineland and the Swiss margins legislated to accept the Protestant Reformation. The cantons of Zürich and Bern did so too. In southern Germany, where the influence of evangelical Protestantism had been considerable, the number of imperial cities which introduced reforming Church ordinances by 1530 could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In northern Germany and on the Baltic coast the evangelical movement was also only just beginning to get under way, though it would eventually be as significant there as well. In larger German territories, the early princely adopters of Lutheranism – Electoral Saxony (led by John the Constant, who succeeded Frederick the Wise in 1525) and Philip of Hesse – were few. The most energetic princes in northern Germany still opposed Lutheranism, convinced that the Estates would find a way to conjoin imperial and Church reform. More numerous were those who sat on the fence, remaining loyal to the old Church, but not standing in the way of the spread of evangelical preaching in their territories so long as their own authority was not threatened.

The secularization of the Prussian territory of the Teutonic Order in 1525 served as a case apart – not only because it was not properly part of the empire but also because its acceptance of the Reformation rode on the back of a collapse of the order in the face of double threats from peasant disorders within and Polish takeover from without. The prevailing hesitancy seemed in line with the Recess of the Diet of Speyer in 1526 which decided that each Estate should conduct their affairs in religion ‘as [they] hope and trust to answer to God and his Imperial Majesty’ until the meeting of a general council of the Church or a national assembly.

That gave the princes and cities of the Estates what would become known as the ‘right of Reformation’ (ius reformandi) – the right to determine the religion of their subjects. On that basis Philip of Hesse and John the Constant of Saxony set about framing the establishment of territorial churches in their dominions, with Melanchthon and Luther offering the justification for why a ruler, divinely ordained, had the Christian duty to promote the Gospels in the lands under his authority. The Speyer Recess was, however, provisional and it could be reversed. In the later 1520s, the territorial stakeholders of the empire began to form confessional allegiances. At the succeeding Diet of 1529, also summoned to Speyer, the imperial and Catholic camp was stronger. Archduke Ferdinand rebuilt Habsburg alliances in southern Germany. Duke George of Ducal Saxony, the most articulate of Catholic North German princes, made no secret of where princely duties lay. God sought revenge on the ‘Martinians’ who had introduced heresy into Christendom. He would not thank those who had failed to act in its defence. The Diet of 1529 revoked the previous Recess and enforced the Edict of Worms wherever possible. The majority of the Estates agreed, and proceeded to ban any further religious innovations. Zwinglianism was also abolished in the empire, and anyone convicted of adult baptism was condemned to death.

A few of the Estates reacted to this Recess by publishing on 19 July 1529 a minority decision, or ‘Protest’ (hence the name ‘Protestantism’), signed by a number of princes and the representatives of fourteen imperial cities. Using the argument that a majority decision could not annul a unanimous decision of a previous Diet, and that a decision of conscience about religion was between an individual and God, that Protest became the foundation for the Lutheran Reformation. Charles V himself was present at the Diet of Augsburg, whose proceedings dominated the following year (April–September 1530). The Arch-Chancellor invited written statements on the religious question. Lutheran Protestants responded with the Articles of Torgau, which dealt mainly with questions of ecclesiastical organization. Philipp Melanchthon, who attended the Diet, also included a statement of doctrine, presented under the signature of eleven princes and two imperial cities to the Estates on 25 June 1530, which became known as the Confession of Augsburg. The ‘evangelical’ Estates of the Rhineland and southwest German cities, where Zwinglianism had gained its adherents, submitted their own confession, known as the Tetrapolitana (after the four cities in whose name it was presented: Strasbourg, Constance, Memmingen and Lindau). The Lutheran Reformation was now a distinct entity.

THE POLITICS OF THE LUTHERAN REFORMATION

The Protestant minority in the Estates faced an uphill task. Although the emperor was absent from German lands through the 1530s, his authority in the north and west was reinforced through the Low Countries. In the west, it was strengthened by the Catholicism of the dukes of Lorraine and the Habsburg county of Burgundy. Even the oppositional rivalry of the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria was eased when Duke Ulrich was restored to his duchy of Württemberg in 1534. German territorial rulers remained wedded to the concept of the empire and loyal to the emperor as the guarantor of political stability and order in the Reich. Only gradually did the spread of Protestantism among the nobility change the balance of forces.

The Schmalkaldic League, formed in 1531 of the protesting minority of territorial entities, was a novelty in imperial politics – a transregional confessional alignment with its own treasury, troops, meetings and, by the end of the 1530s, foreign policy. Most wise heads continued to imagine that the empire’s divisions were temporary, and that they would be resolved around a moderately reformed German Church. The latter seemed the most credible option to those who regarded the recovery of political unity as the prerequisite for progress on other fronts. That was why theologians, legists and diplomats met for discussions in or around the Diets at Augsburg (1530), and Regensburg (1541) and at various colloquies in between. Each time they failed, to mutual recriminations. Only gradually was it clear that German princes and cities had to decide for or against the Reformation.

Emperor Charles V, spurred to action by the international scene as well as by a Catholic league of German princes, sought to reverse the creeping advance of Lutheranism by military force. Exactly when that decision was made is not clear, but the ground was laid by the succession of Duke Maurice to Ducal Saxony in 1541. His forthright approach galvanized Catholics in the empire and intensified the anxieties of the Schmalkaldic League, which by then had become weakened. Philip of Hesse’s bigamy enfeebled its claims to stand for the Christian duty of princes. A joint attack on Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel by Hesse and Electoral Saxony depleted their joint treasury. The pope’s call for a general council of the Church to meet at Trent in 1545 ended efforts to seek a regional solution to the empire’s divisions by a council. Above all, the Peace of Crépy (September 1544) gave Charles the assurances he needed that France would not intervene on behalf of the Schmalkaldic League.

The military campaign launched by the emperor against the Protestants was carefully planned and brilliantly executed. He secured the support of Ducal Saxony and Bavaria by promising both of them Electorships. In addition, he offered a marriage between the son of Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria and one of Ferdinand’s daughters, and (to Duke Maurice) the administration of the lucrative dioceses of Magdeburg and Halberstadt. Then, on the eve of the Diet of Regensburg in July 1546, he announced to the Protestant Estates that he was obliged to act against ‘disobedient princes’, outlawing the Landgrave of Hesse and Elector of Saxony for an alleged breach of the imperial peace. That cleverly turned the issue at the Estates towards the preservation of imperial law and jurisdiction. Realizing that they were facing a military showdown, the southern members of the Schmalkaldic League mustered over 50,000 men, while key Electors of the empire (Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Brandenburg) announced their neutrality. The emperor’s troops took time to arrive but the League was held at bay. Ferdinand’s mobilization, too, was hampered by the rebellion in Bohemia, and Duke Maurice’s troops initially refused to fight alongside Spaniards. Eventually, however, a combined Saxon and Bohemian army invaded Electoral Saxony, defeating the Elector’s forces at Mühlberg (24 April 1547) and capturing the Elector himself. On 19 May, just over a year after Luther’s death, imperial troops entered Wittenberg without a fight. In his Commentary on the German War (1549), the Castilian historian Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga wrote that the imperial army crossing the Elbe reminded him of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. In 1548, Titian painted the emperor on horseback drawing on Dürer’s image of the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Determined to exploit the victory, Charles V summoned the Diet to Augsburg. With his troops standing by, he issued the Interim of 1548, making some concessions to Protestant sensibilities, but essentially re-imposing Catholicism and threatening the privileges of those who held out against his authority. The Protestant states mostly gave way, with the exception of Magdeburg, an early adopter of the Reformation (1524) and a long-standing member of the Schmalkaldic League. In the aftermath of the Interim, refugees swelled the numbers within the walls as the city prepared to defend itself against the forces of Duke Maurice of Ducal Saxony. In a siege lasting over a year, the duke’s troops burned the suburbs and fought off attempts to relieve it, losing 4,000 men before Magdeburg negotiated a capitulation in November 1551. Within the besieged city, a remarkable transformation took place, masterminded by theologians and publicists who were mostly not its native inhabitants. Hartmann Beyer, Matthias Flacius Illyricus and Nikolaus von Amsdorf authored pamphlets which proclaimed themselves as the true spiritual inheritors of Luther’s message and Magdeburg as ‘Our Lord God’s Chancery’. Nikolaus Gallus was the author of the 1550 Confession, Instruction and Warning, which argued for the responsibility of the magistrates of the city (as ‘lesser magistrates’ in the empire) to resist the unconstitutional and unjust actions of the emperor.

The siege of Magdeburg was a manifestation of the politics of conviction, where religious identity would be coterminous with political loyalty, both couched in historically rooted salvation myths. Its resistance demonstrated that armed opposition on religious grounds could succeed. Once the siege was raised, Duke Maurice, gamekeeper turned poacher, led a new revolt of princes against the emperor in 1552 which adopted the argument of the ‘lesser magistrate’ to its own cause. Charles V was forced to concede in law precisely that ius reformandi which he had tried to eliminate militarily. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) furnished the framework for the later Reformation in German lands, legalizing Lutheranism in the hands of established authority.

PROTESTANT DIVISIONS

The Reformation placed the spotlight on controlling the relationship between what people believed and how they behaved. The significance of the written ‘Confession’ was that it sought to do just that. It is no coincidence that the first of these, the Schleitheim Confession (1527), was Anabaptist. In the wake of the defeat of the Peasants’ War, scattered remnants endeavoured, under the pressure of those who denied everything they stood for, to put in place their vision of the Church, such as it had existed in the days of the Apostles. They were mostly country people. The Schleitheim Confession was a declaration in time and space – many later Anabaptists would express their own beliefs differently. Anabaptists’ theology was often of secondary importance to the way that they lived their lives. To live in, but not of, the world created hard choices. These included whether, and in what circumstances, they should acknowledge the rule of princes who, they thought, were not Christian at all. A Christian community of goods was another common ideal, albeit differently realized among Anabaptists. In Swiss and southern German Anabaptism, it was compatible with family households as the primary focus for living and believing. In Moravia, however, a further Anabaptist diaspora led to Anabaptist missions to smaller towns (Nikolsburg, Brünn and Znaim) and then (after internal divisions) to settlements on noble estates. Proclaiming themselves the true adherents of Jacob Hutter, a charismatic Anabaptist from the Puster valley, they lived in communities of about 500 people in which elders organized communal houses, crèches, schools and craft-production, keeping themselves to themselves in a world that, by and large, let them be. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Anabaptists contended with persecution – Protestant as well as Catholic. In time they learned to adapt to it, avoiding military service or other duties against their consciences, outwardly conforming to the religion of the prince, ensuring that their children married only Anabaptists, and keeping the faith. Territorialized, confessional religion encouraged such outward conformity, allowing Anabaptism to remain a minority presence across central Europe. Where local conditions favoured it, as in southeast Moravia or in the chaos of the emerging Dutch northern provinces, it may have been the religion of about 10 per cent of the population by around 1600. Princely persecution and urban magisterial surveillance did not eradicate it. Anabaptism stood for issues which the Reformation had raised but not resolved.

The growing superstructure of Protestant theologians drafted Lutheran and Zwinglian confessions and cemented the ‘magisterial Reformation’. In fact, the process had already begun with treatises defining Reformation beliefs. What Luther regarded as canonical beliefs emerged in his ‘Large Catechism’, published in April 1529 for study by the growing cohorts of students in theology from Wittenberg. That generated the ‘Small Catechism’, which Luther intended for use in domestic environments and schools. The Reformation changed what religious belief was about. Confessional Christianity became a credal religion in which secular and religious authority had a joint stake in administering tests of belief and monitoring behaviour.

Protestant princes seized the initiative to define beliefs. After the Recess of Speyer, Philip of Hesse summoned his clergy to Homburg in October 1526 and, with the assistance of a former Franciscan from Avignon, François Lambert, proclaimed a Reformation for his principality which included changes to its schools, hospitals and poor relief. Luther took exception to it, and collaborated instead with Elector John the Constant in the elaboration of a Wittenberg model, one that was adopted in the Electorate and widely copied elsewhere in Lutheran lands. Church services were standardized around Luther’s German Mass, monasteries and church fabric were administered by secular authorities, evangelical pastors were appointed by them, and a regular process of parochial visitations instigated, taking princely control of the Reformation into the parishes. Not surprisingly, the centralization of principalities in Germany often coincided with the period when Protestant princes consolidated their rule through religious change.

The princely Reformation turned out, not only in Germany but elsewhere in northern Europe, to be a conservative affair. The Swedish Reformation is a case in point. Building on the newly accomplished revolt from Danish rule, Gustav Vasa dispossessed the Church of its lands, threw out the Danish senior clergy and appointed his own, and instituted a Reformation in which the Swedish Mass retained altars, crucifixes, candles, vestments, the Virgin Mary and saints’ days. All that changed was the use of the vernacular instead of Latin, the communion in both kinds, and the suppression of incense and holy water. Cautious Reformation proved enduring, but its solidity came at a price. It relied on top–down religious structures in which secular forces played a dominant role. Where that occurred, the fear of the ‘outsider’ (initially Catholics but then also non-Lutherans) was one facet of an obsession with ‘order’, manifested in legislation governing people’s social and moral behaviour.

By contrast, the Reformation’s explosive dynamics lasted longer in the urban landscape. There, and especially in the Rhineland, Zürich offered an alternative model, less conservative and with different relationships of power and communication. These latter focused on the relationship between words and things, between the spiritual world and the world as it is. Luther had one intransigent view on that matter, Zwingli another. Landgrave Philip of Hesse tried reconciliation at the Colloquy of Marburg in early October 1529, attended by Zwingli, Luther and associated cohorts of theologians. The dispute turned on the Eucharistic ‘words of institution’. Luther theatrically wrote them in chalk on the table at the beginning: ‘This is my Body’ (Hoc est corpus meum). Fierce argument ensued about how these should be interpreted, in a literal or metaphorical sense, and there was no meeting of minds. Luther felt the political pressures to come to a compromise, but he was ‘shackled, I cannot escape, the Word is too strong’. Zwingli’s dream of a ‘Union’ was shattered and a fundamental rift, leading to two different lineaments of the Reformation, occurred. Schism was not just in Christendom, but within the movement which (without intending to) was tearing it asunder.