Christendom rested on cultural, social and political foundations reflecting the institutions and habits of thought which sustained its fabric and vitality. So, in the heartland of Latin Christendom lay the patchwork of Italian bishoprics (as many as the rest of western Christendom put together) and religious foundations which, along with the existence of the Papal States as a regional power, conditioned the reception of Protestantism in the Italian peninsula. A frontier legacy dictated the Iberian peninsula’s reactions. The existence of Jewish and Muslim minorities and of Judeo-Christian and Morisco converts under the impact of the Christian Reconquista determined responses to Protestant ideas in that part of the continent. North of the Alps and Pyrenees, different conditions had an impact on the direction of religious change.
Resisting whatever threatened society and its values had been a sustaining force in Christendom. In the sixteenth century, that resistance was complicated. Two uncertainties were intertwined. One was the nature of Church reform – a cause to which many individuals and groups were committed, but which had been pursued in different ways by various individuals and groups without establishing common cause. The second was the emerging Protestant version of Church reform, which was difficult to evaluate. Was it, as Martin Luther claimed, the only option for reform? Or was this a fundamental challenge to Christendom? Protestants did not speak with one voice so it was difficult to answer these questions. Sometimes Protestants echoed what many already thought. Even the distinction between ‘justification by faith’ (or rather God’s saving grace to man, a continuing and respectable Augustinian theological theme) and ‘justification by faith alone’ (excluding ‘good works’) was one whose significance only gradually became clearer. In northern Italy, for example, the Benedictine monks in Padua, part of a reformed group centred on the monastery at Monte Cassino (known as the ‘Cassinese congregation’), studied the writings of the early Greek fathers to prove that this was a false dichotomy, and that human works and divine grace were both necessary to restore human nature to the way God intended it to be. So much was wrapped up in the language and tone by which Protestantism was conveyed.
From 1521, Lutheranism was a heresy, condemned by the papacy, Louvain, the Sorbonne and Cologne. But political circumstances, combined with its own dynamic, turned Luther’s Reformation into something that could not be immediately eliminated. That made the institutional response complex. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities did not see eye to eye. In addition, Protestantism was not the only threat to Christendom. In Mediterranean Europe, the Ottomans were closer, Protestants a second-order issue. Many hoped someone else would deal with the Protestant problem or that prayer and reform would bring about Protestants’ reconciliation to the Church. There was a divide between those who sought to turn back the spread of Protestantism and those who wanted to adapt to it, turn its own weapons against it. Where that internal debate was intense, the response to the Reformation vacillated.
TARES AMONG THE WHEAT
St Augustine not only inspired the Protestant Reformation, but was also the preferred theologian when it came to justifying religious intolerance. Responding to the threat from the North African sect of Donatists, the bishop of Hippo argued that coercion could legitimately be employed to induce the recalcitrant to see the error of their ways. Using the parable of Christ at the banquet (Luke 14:23), Augustine said that ‘compel them to come in’ (compelle intrare) was the biblical legitimation for using force against heretics, an astringent medicine, inducing repentance in the erring individual. But what if repentance was not forthcoming? Later Patristic writers were clear that obstinate heretics had to be exterminated, limbs amputated to preserve the rest of the body in good health. The Spanish Franciscan Alfonso de Castro constructed compelle intrare into a biblical justification for colonialism. Becoming counsellor to Emperor Charles V, he then published an encyclopaedia of heresy in 1534. A later work, On the Just Punishment of Heretics (1547), earned Castro his reputation as the heretics’ ‘scourge’. He wrote it on return to his native city of Zamora from the Council of Trent, surprised to hear people openly criticizing the emperor’s wars against German Protestants.
Castro set about proving them wrong. The death penalty was a legitimate punishment for obstinate heretics. If Luther had been executed, the German mess would not have occurred. Going easy on heresy merely stacked up problems for the future – and anyone who thought its punishment should be left to God alone must be crazy. That was in the context of the parable of the tares (Matthew 13), often a starting-point for those who took a strong line against Protestantism. Castro later put compelle intrare into practice. He spent the last years of his life preaching in Antwerp, the largest city of the Netherlands and a viper’s nest of heretics. In the responses to the Reformation, those from the Spanish peninsula were unusual. Protestant heresy was successfully repulsed and by means of the state. The heartland of Christendom’s largest dynastic empire had a unique experience of Reformation.
Spain’s exceptionalism rested on its history as a frontier state. Muslims had dominated parts of the Spanish peninsula for centuries. With them Jews had settled in both Christian and Muslim realms, all three religions cohabiting in a complicated coexistence (convivencia). But the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula were dedicated to its reconquest, something which they achieved with the fall of Granada in 1492. Convivencia became a thing of the past. The Jews were given an ultimatum to convert to Christianity or leave the country, similar moves against Muslims following shortly thereafter. The result was emigration, but mass Christian baptism too. The latter created ‘New Christians’, former Jews (conversos) and Muslims (moriscos). In both cases, their religious traditions included arguments for outward conformity, while practising privately and believing otherwise. But dissimulation became a problem when the state aligned itself with faith. Dissimulation towards the one implied dissension as to the other. Ferdinand and Isabella established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 as an ecclesiastical court under their direct authority to deal with that problem. King John III of Portugal followed suit in 1536. Very different from the medieval Inquisition, the Holy Office was a state bureaucracy, staffed by officials trained in canon law, operating under a papal charter but usually independent of Rome’s authority. Its initial role was to supervise new converts and it was given the resources to do so – local informers, officials to guard ports and frontiers, overseers to control what was printed, prisons and archives. Inefficient by modern standards and frequently overstretched, sometimes criticized by the Cortes in the peninsula and ecclesiastics, it made its presence felt, establishing an orthodoxy of behaviour and belief.
The result can be judged in terms of what people read and how they came by it. Printing arrived late in the Spanish peninsula, an imported technology. In Seville, for example, three generations of the Cromberger family (originally from Germany) undertook New World printing, a profitable contract and one that they took care not to compromise by printing anything heterodox themselves. Printing was limited to major cities and university towns, which made the control of indigenous production easier. Building on the system of licensing printers, the Inquisition proved effective at overseeing who printed what, as well as what was being imported. The Spanish Index of Prohibited Books, first published by the royal council in 1551, was comprehensive.
The Spanish market for Bibles and devotional literature was buoyant. Erasmus, among others, met the demand. His success, however, was ephemeral. From 1525 onwards, his works fell under suspicion of having fostered the devotions of those whom the Inquisitor General proclaimed as ‘Illuminists’ (Alumbrados). In urban centres of New Castile, in university circles at Salamanca, and in the households of the upper aristocracy, private prayer groups discreetly practised the attainment of inner penitence as a route towards total abandonment to the love of God. To the Inquisition, this challenged the conjuncture between conformity of belief and behaviour. Although there is no evidence that the Illuminists read Protestant books, they were tarred with the Lutheran brush.
The Illuminists were treated leniently. Under the surface and despite the Inquisition, their influence survived. The Spanish humanist who became Charles V’s chancellor, Alfonso de Valdés, saw no problem in corresponding privately with Luther and Melanchthon, or in expressing his contempt for the papacy in his defence of the sack of Rome in 1527. But the Inquisition kept an eye on him and might well have taken things further had he not died in 1532. By then his brother, Juan de Valdés, had left for Rome to write the first of a series of works whose circulation in Spain and Italy served as a litmus test of heterodoxy.
By 1550, only one individual had been executed by the Inquisition for Protestantism, and under forty people had been investigated. But in 1557, a consignment of letters and Genevan anti-papal books fell into the wrong hands. Suspects in Seville were rounded up and arrested. Charles V was informed and almost his last letter to his son Philip II demanded exemplary punishment for those caught. The fraught international situation provided the context for a series of autos-da-fé (from the Latin actus fidei or Act of Faith) which began in Valladolid on 21 May 1559 with the new king, Philip II, in attendance. The most remarkable arrest was that of the primate of Spain himself, Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, archbishop of Toledo. Politically motivated, the Carranza investigation on a charge of heresy generated paper and suspects. What the Inquisitors uncovered was bigger and more coordinated than they had hitherto imagined. Students attending foreign universities were recalled. Vigilance was imposed on border-crossings. Foreign print-workers fell under suspicion – mostly heresy by hearsay for, although they worked with books, it was not from their pages that they derived the nonconformity of which they were suspected. These were watershed years for Protestantism in the Spanish peninsula. In the end, only about a hundred Protestants were executed in Spain from 1559 to 1566 – under half the number put to death in a similar period under Mary Tudor, a quarter of those killed under Henry II in France, and only a tenth of those executed in the Low Countries in those same years. After around 1560, the tiny minority of Spanish Protestants took up exile north of the Alps, their writings blackening the reputation of Philip II and the Inquisition.
LIVING JUSTIFIED
In 1543, an anonymous book appeared in Venice entitled the Most Useful Treatise of the Benefit of Jesus Christ Crucified (Il Beneficio di Cristo). Enigmatic, it set out how it felt to be justified, and what it meant for ordinary people to be able to say that Christ was their brother. The work was the bestseller of an Italian Reformation that never was. So ruthlessly was it pursued by the Inquisition that no copy appeared to survive until, 300 years later, one turned up in a Cambridge college library. Its story reflects the problematic history of the Italian response to the Protestant Reformation.
That the work was printed in Venice is no surprise. The city’s presses were renowned. Not dominated by the Habsburgs, the Venetian Republic also kept its distance from Rome. Unlike Spain’s, Italy’s borders were porous and Protestant ideas circulated widely. Students came across the Alps to study in Venetian universities. Merchants transacted business north of the Alps as a matter of course. All the signs are that, at least until the Benefit of Christ was published, the works of the Protestant reformers were known and available in northern Italy.
Who wrote the Benefit of Christ, and why? In August 1566, Pietro Carnesecchi revealed in a trial before the Inquisition in Rome that the author was ‘Don Benedetto’, it being later revised by Marcantonio Flaminio. Carnesecchi was a papal secretary whose address-book gave the Inquisition the identities of the spirituali (those who wanted to reform the Church from within). The name of Flaminio points to other influences among Italian evangelism, a now contested term for those who sought a route to ecclesiastical reform that avoided Protestantism. A poet and philosopher from Venice, Flaminio became a member of the household of the reforming bishop Gian Matteo Giberti in 1528. That was the year when Giberti withdrew to his diocese in Verona, one of the wealthy towns on the Venetian terra firma. Giberti already moved in the spiritual circles of the Roman Oratory of Divine Love and the Theatines. Now he set out to create a model diocese. His initiative was among many that counted as the Catholic Reformation – meaning those attempts to reform the Church from within. There was also talk of Flaminio encouraging lay study of the Bible, preaching and frequent communion. Retiring to Naples on health grounds in 1539, Flaminio joined a circle of reform-minded men and women around Juan de Valdés, especially Bernardino Ochino and Giulia Gonzaga, and drank the pure wine of Valdesianism (a complex theological blend of Erasmianism, Illuminism and Lutheranism). It was in Naples that Flaminio met ‘Don Benedetto’, whom detective work by Italian historians revealed as a monk from the Cassinese congregation. Its influence is detectable in the Benefit of Christ, whose initial version was probably written in 1539.
With the death of Valdés in 1541, Flaminio and others from Naples moved north to join the household of Reginald Pole. Pole was an English aristocrat and cardinal who had first arrived in Italy in 1521 to study at Padua, but who returned in 1532 as an exile in protest at the Henrician divorce. His social eminence made him a soulmate to Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian patrician and ambassador who had been made a cardinal by Pope Paul III in 1535. Between them, Pole and Contarini encapsulated the false hopes of reform in Italy in the 1530s and 40s. They both sat (with Giberti) on the commission (the Council for the Reform of the Church) established by Pope Paul in 1536 in expectation of a general council. Its report was a dead letter. Even more hopes were raised when Contarini was appointed papal delegate to the Colloquy at Regensburg in 1541, where he entered into direct negotiations with German Protestant theologians, securing with them an agreed statement on justification by faith. After the talks broke down, Contarini was portrayed as a dangerous compromiser.
Contarini died under a cloud, some said poisoned by his enemies, in 1542. Among the most prominent of Italy’s ‘philo-Protestants’, Bernardino Ochino and Peter Martyr Vermigli fled in fear of the newly founded Papal Inquisition, deciding that their future lay north of the Alps, the beginnings of a brain- and spirit-drain of would-be reformers. By then, a revised version of the Benefit of Christ had been published, and it was accused of being a compendium of Lutheranism. Few Italians who read it were probably aware of how much of it came from Protestant sources. Its popularity in the 1540s corresponded to the decade when crypto-Protestant beliefs threatened to create a mass movement. In Modena, Bergamo, Siena, Lucca and elsewhere in Tuscany, dearth and social tension combined with religious dissent. In Venice, Padua and Ferrara, crypto-Protestant conventicles became more public. Meanwhile, in Rome, the opponents of Contarini (called ‘zealots’ by his diminishing band of supporters) now had the upper hand, led by the Neapolitan Gian Pietro Carafa, future Pope Paul IV. They sought to prove that the spirituali were naive compromisers, and that the Roman Inquisition had arrived (1542) just in time. By the end of the 1540s, the impact of repression began to be felt. The majority of those under suspicion drew a line under their previous beliefs. The minority who could do so, or felt moved to, joined the émigrés across the Alps, increasingly in Geneva. In the mountain valleys of Savoy and Piedmont (and in Calabria, around Montalto to the south of Naples), Waldensians (survivors of a late-medieval heresy) linked up with Genevan Protestants. Moulding their beliefs to the latter, they provided an underground Protestant network that survived beyond 1560.
A handful of émigré intellectuals were attracted to freedom north of the Alps, but could not stomach the confessional straitjacket of Geneva. These included Lelio Sozzini, whose father was a professor of law at Padua and who studied there himself. Moving across the Venetian border into the Swiss Alps in 1547, he wrote treatises which existed only in manuscript in his lifetime, in which he envisaged the resurrection being just for the righteous, the souls of the rest dying along with their bodies. Such speculation worried reformers in Zürich and Geneva, and Sozzini’s views on the Trinity were suspect too. After his death in 1562, his nephew Fausto Sozzini continued where his uncle had left off and, remarkably, did so while working quietly as a secretary in the service of the Medici in Tuscany. He published his uncle’s writings only after leaving Italy in 1574, his later peregrinations in Transylvania and Poland spreading what became known as anti-Trinitarian Socinianism by the end of the sixteenth century.
Italy did not have a Protestant Reformation, and historians ask why that was. Was it because it was too timid, polite and aristocratic? Was there a failure of leadership or of ideology? But this is to judge things in the peninsula by what happened in Germany. The story of the Benefit of Christ introduces other issues: the difficulties in undertaking reform from the inside without causing religious division, at a time when the peninsula was the focus of intermittent international conflict; and how to spread Protestantism and keep the candle of Church reform alight, even as the forces of repression were massing.
BEFORE THE PLACARDS . . . AND AFTER
There are parallels between the reception of the Protestant Reformation in Italy and France. If Italy’s was the Reformation that never was, France’s was the Reformation that might have been. As in Italy, Luther’s ideas circulated quickly in France after 1519, thanks to books, students and preachers. In August 1524, Guillaume Farel published the Lord’s Prayer and Creed in French, a disguised translation of Luther’s Little Book of Prayers (1522). Published under the nose of the Sorbonne it was the most daring Protestant book to appear in France before 1534. Fewer than eighty Lutheran editions across the whole of France in the 1520s was a drop in the ocean when set alongside the 2,500 other works known to have been published in Paris alone during that decade. In a letter of 1524, Guillaume Farel wrote: ‘Good God how I rejoice when I see how the knowledge of the pure grace of God has spread abroad the greater part of Europe! I hope that Christ will eventually visit France with his benediction . . .’ That hope was expressed, however, while hostile reactions to Luther gathered, orchestrated by Noël Béda, a professor of theology, director of one of the colleges in Paris and rector of the Sorbonne. In what became a leitmotif of the French Reformation, the anxieties about religious change were accompanied by fears of a cataclysmic event – in this case, the fears of a second Flood in 1524. One magistrate in Toulouse was so convinced that he built himself an ark against the eventuality.
In the diocese of Meaux reforming aspirations confronted the forces of reaction. Its bishop was Guillaume Briçonnet, whose ideas for his diocese mirrored those of Matteo Giberti at Verona. Visitations and synods were followed by something more unusual. Determined to reorganize its rural preaching, he established mission stations, manned by a group (the Meaux Circle) holding known reforming convictions. Foremost among them was Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, a biblical scholar and friend of Erasmus. The others were mostly his friends and disciples. Briçonnet was confessor to the king’s sister Marguerite of Navarre and he counted on her protection. It was not enough. After Francis I’s capture at Pavia, the Queen Mother Louise de Savoie became regent in the king’s absence (1525–6). Meaux, a cloth town suffering hard times, began to take the Reformation into its own hands. Catholic posters were torn down and anticlerical chants echoed in the marketplace. Lefèvre fled to Strasbourg, while Briçonnet’s diocese was investigated for heresy by a commission of judges from Paris. In the aftermath of the ‘Affair’ of Meaux, the network of Marguerite of Navarre was all that protected Briçonnet and like-minded humanist reformers.
Although there were patronesses of reform in Italy their influence was nowhere that of Marguerite’s. She was a royal princess, had a huge patrimony, and used this to create niches of safety for those who were reformers who refused to be stereotyped as ‘Lutheran’ or ‘Protestant’. Her first book was the Miroir de l’âme pêcheresse (translated eleven years later as ‘Mirror of a Sinful Soul’ by another princess, Elizabeth Tudor). The mirror in question reflected much else besides Marguerite’s soul – criticisms of ecclesiastical abuses and doubtful doctrines, but also a path by which a Christian could find his own way towards God. More revealing, though only through a glass darkly, was her later work, published in 1547 as Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses (1547), a collection of chansons, poems and play-texts, no doubt composed at an earlier date. A vehicle for protecting and furthering the careers of those of advanced religious opinions in France, Marguerite also invoked her right as a princess to avoid committing herself confessionally. In the early 1530s, prudent behaviour allowed the ‘evangelicals’ to congregate. It was Reformation by stealth.
The ‘Affair of the Placards’ stopped it in its tracks. On the night of 17–18 October 1534, an anonymous printed billboard (placard) entitled True Articles on the Horrible, Great and Insupportable Abuses of the Papal Mass was posted up in Paris, other cities and even (it was reported not long after) on the door of the king’s bedchamber in the château at Amboise. Two copies still survive, written (as is now known) by Antoine Marcourt, a pastor at Neuchâtel, the first French-speaking city in Europe to become Protestant. It attacked ‘papists’ who ‘pretended’ that the Mass was a ‘sacrifice’, covering up in a ‘big word’ (transubstantiation) the ‘invention’ that Christ was corporally present in the consecrated bread and wine. Parisian Catholics were outraged. Expiatory processions were organized and 200–300 people arrested. In December a special judicial tribunal was formed to find and judge those responsible. There was a procession, led by the king himself. Six victims were burned in public and a public crackdown began. The ‘Affair of the Placards’ played into the hands of the enemies of reform. Marguerite kept her distance, staying at Angoulême and Nérac. In her entourage was the son of a minor ecclesiastical official with a humanist training in law, Jean Calvin. At the end of 1534 or early the following year, he made his way to Basel.
JEAN CALVIN AND GENEVA
Calvin was in voluntary exile. Basel offered safety but not security. Fortunately for him, his cousin Pierre-Robert Olivétan lived there. Evangelically inclined like Calvin, he was completing his French translation of the Bible, to which Calvin provided prefaces. That addressed to ‘Those who love Jesus Christ and his Gospel’ was an evocation of all that God had created. Published in Neuchâtel, Olivétan’s Bible (paid for by the Waldensians) was a remarkable achievement. Calvin later altered it, but he did not change the way in which Olivétan chose, wherever possible, to render the Hebrew in terms that had no trace of the old religion. ‘Bishop’ became ‘surveillant’; ‘priest’, ‘pasteur’; ‘chalice’, ‘cup’; ‘church’, ‘temple’, etc. The glossary of French Protestantism was under construction.
Some of Basel’s printers were committed to the evangelical cause. In March 1536, two of them published the first Latin edition of a book that (in a very different form) would become indissociable from the name of Calvin. It was initially entitled Of the Christian Religion, the Institution. Calvin had perhaps travelled with a draft of the text on paper or in his head. In form, it was a manual of Protestant orthodoxy. But it was also intended as an apology for the French ‘evangelicals’ facing post-Placard repression. In a preface addressed to Francis I, Calvin countered the suggestion that they were the sixteenth-century equivalent of terrorists. The Institution of the title implied ‘manual’, but it also meant ‘foundation’. Protestants, Calvin told the king, supported the pillars of the Christian faith. They were not the cause of trouble; that was the fault of others. He quoted 1 Kings 18: ‘it is not we who spread errors abroad or incite tumults; it is they who contend against God’s power’.
The work opened with a sentence whose formula came from Cicero: ‘Almost all sacred doctrine consists of two parts: knowledge of God, and of ourselves.’ That combined knowledge was ‘nothing else than a firm conviction of mind whereby we determine with ourselves that God’s truth is so certain, that it is incapable of not accomplishing what it has pledged to do by his holy Word’. Calvin was paraphrasing a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (10:11), which would be the work on which he published his first Bible commentary four years later in March 1540. By then, he had thoroughly revised the Institution. Publishing this second edition (renamed the Institution of the Christian Religion) in 1539, he now envisaged it as complementing his biblical commentaries. The work was intended ‘to prepare and instruct candidates in sacred theology in the reading of the divine Word’, and to contain the ‘sum of religion in all its parts’ so that, when it came to expositions of the Scriptures, he would be able to ‘condense them’ since he had already laid out the underlying fabric. Thereafter, through to the final Latin edition of the Institutes (as they are known) in Calvin’s lifetime (1559), its text grew, taking into account the weight of his learning and the need to complement his Bible commentaries as they appeared. In subsequent editions, that crucial first sentence was also changed, subtly but significantly. Under a heading which emphasized that ‘the knowledge of God and that of ourselves are connected’, Calvin now began the sentence ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess . . .’ – i.e. the knowledge that we fallen creatures can manage about God. Theology for Calvin was not God’s truth but our imperfect attempts to grapple with the truth which God had chosen to give us. In the Scriptures, God ‘prattles at us, like nurses with babies’, to ‘accommodate the knowledge of him to our slender capacity’.
For Calvin, the role of a commentator was to understand the author. In Romans, he entered into the mind of Paul of Tarsus. We cannot know God in his essence. We can know him only by his creation and by the fact that he embodies righteousness and goodness. We human beings crave the latter, but we are incapable of achieving it. We live in an ‘abyss’ of sin, a ‘labyrinth’ of our own making, and the righteousness in God condemns us. For Calvin, the ‘justification’ that is the essence of the Pauline Epistle was how the Creator restores us, the unrighteous. God finds the way to do that, just as he had for Abraham. He allows Christ to ‘indwell’ in us such that we are ‘engrafted in Christ’ or ‘coalesce with Christ’. The sacraments are ‘instruments’ to nourish our faith, ‘seals’ which imprint the promises of God on our hearts and confirm the certainty of grace. That happens at God’s good pleasure and not to everyone. The twin sons of Isaac belonged to the tribe of Israel, with whom God had made a covenant. But God chose Jacob and rejected Esau. That, too, belongs to God’s righteousness though we cannot comprehend it. We can be sure, though, since this is the message of the Scriptures, that God chooses his faithful, that there is no salvation without election, that human merit has nothing to do with being elected, and that he never abandons those who are called.
This was Calvin’s radicalism: a double predestination, some being saved and others damned. It took the dichotomy in Christendom between the believing core and the periphery of infidelity and turned it into a division within Christendom’s core. That said, predestination was not as emphatic in Calvin’s thought as it would be for some of his adherents. Predestination spoke to them about the more divided Europe in which they lived. For Calvin, predestination was not an invitation to anxiety about God’s justice but a full stop to speculation on the matter. To the question: ‘Am I saved?’ he replied that belonging to the Church and knowing Christ in one’s heart were signs of election. That was liberation from angst. There was no need to build an ark. The rest was about living with Christ in the world, a conflictual maze of human passions. But God’s creation was not without order, and in human affairs we had a ‘duty of love’ towards our neighbours, citizens, rulers, even though they may not be Christians themselves. It was the scattered communities to whom Paul sent his epistles that became Calvin’s models for the tribulations of the godly in the world.
Geneva, where Calvin arrived by chance in 1536 and stayed to give Bible lectures, was no such model. It was a medium-sized city of about 12,000 inhabitants, mostly French-speaking, crowded within newly rebuilt defensive walls, and located on a hill overlooking the western end of Lake Geneva. It had been ruled by a prince-bishop who owed overlordship to the dukes of Savoy. In 1526, however, the Genevans rejected their bishop and the magistrates confiscated Church wealth. But there were divisions over how the Reformation was to proceed. Guillaume Farel, a former member of the Circle of Meaux who had left because it was not radical enough, came to the city for the first time in 1532. True to form, he was confrontational and was lucky to escape with his life. But then, on 21 May 1536, the Genevans suspended Roman Catholic worship, destroyed images and adopted the Reformation. Either Calvin or, more likely, Farel drafted the ‘Ecclesiastical Ordinances’ and ‘Confession’ which the magistrates decreed should be sworn by all inhabitants of the city. That oath, and strong-arm tactics in getting people to adopt the new measures, produced a reaction. When the city authorities ordered their new ‘pastors’ to conform to the Eucharistic practices of its Swiss neighbour and erstwhile ‘protector’, the canton of Bern, Farel and Calvin refused to celebrate Easter communion and were banished. Calvin only returned reluctantly three years later, in 1541, and on his own terms. The intervening period spent in Strasbourg under the tutelage of Martin Bucer was a training course in how to establish a Church so that it nurtured the best in everyone without compromising its core values, how to survive in the confessional crossfire between Zürich and Wittenberg, and how to become respected in the unstable politics of the upper Rhine and western Swiss margins.
That stood Calvin in good stead in the 1540s as he sought accommodation in the religious differences among Protestant communities. The first sessions of the Council of Trent indicated that there was nothing more to be expected from reconciliation with Catholicism. Calvin already regarded Charles V as a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar, sent by God to punish the Protestants for their disunity. The Lutheran defeat at Mühlberg in April 1547 seemed to prove him right. Securing unity among Protestants, however, looked next to impossible, given the differing views of the Lord’s Supper between Wittenberg and Zürich. Calvin set out his convictions on the sacraments in a Short Treatise, written in Strasbourg but published only once he returned to Geneva. They were the ways that God met our feeble capacity for understanding, outward signs which had no power in themselves. By how we come to regard them, however, and through the effect of faith, they embody everything that faith is and does in us. By that embodiment the Lord’s Supper becomes more than a sign. ‘Let us,’ he said in the 1543 version of the Institutes, ‘learn not to take away the thing signified from the sign’, for ‘the truth must never be separated from the signs’. That made it harder for Calvin to persuade the ‘patriarch’ (‘Antistes’) of Zürich, Heinrich Bullinger, to make common cause with Geneva. After a visit, Calvin wrote to him that ‘although I am conscious in myself of a more inward union with Christ in the sacrament than you express in your words, yet this ought not to prevent our having the same Christ; or our being one in Him. It is only perhaps through this inward consensus that we can unite with each other.’ That is what Calvin achieved in 1549 when he signed up to the Zürich Consensus (Consensus Tigurinus). Its twenty-six articles were a theological compromise. Its opponents accused it of being ‘syncretist’ – a term first deployed by Erasmus to mean a convenient agreement between two parties to make a common front against others. They were mostly right. But it was the beginning of something else: a bicephalous (Calvin and Bullinger) ‘Reformed’ Protestant tradition which offered a defensible theological inheritance at the time when Lutheranism was hardening its confessional stance.
Calvin set about establishing a constitution for the Genevan Church. On 20 November 1541 the city’s magistrates agreed to his draft with some amendments to protect their authority. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances created a self-regulating, visible community of believers, whose pastors led the congregation but were appointed and watched over by laymen. It was an ecclesiastical polity in which there was a process of mutual ‘edification’. Other posts – teachers (‘doctors’), poor-relief administrators (‘deacons’) and Church councillors (‘elders’) – had the same procedures of appointment and surveillance. The arrangements reflected Calvin’s study of the early Pauline Church and his legal background. They reveal his preference for collegiate governance. The pastors were required to meet together once a week for Bible discussions – the origins of the ‘Congregation of Pastors’, in time a formidable institution, respected both in the city and abroad. At the heart of the Church lay the ‘consistory’, a self-regulating council of laity and clergy to oversee the morals and wellbeing of the community. The Protestant cities of Zürich, Basel and Bern had established ‘marriage courts’ to resolve matters previously handled by ecclesiastical courts. Calvin’s consistory was different since it oversaw the morality of the congregation at large. In practice, the pastors became the paid servants of the Genevan state to whom they owed allegiance, and the appointments of elders were ratified by the city council. Only the power of excommunication remained solely in the hands of the consistory.
Calvin sought new pastors for the Church. There were many vacancies but a shortage of candidates meeting his exacting standards. An early casualty was Sebastian Châtillon (Castellio). Calvin had invited him to teach in the college at Geneva and become a pastor. It looked like a good appointment. Their relationship soured, however, over theological differences which reveal Calvin’s insecurity. It took the arrival of other exiles to turn the Genevan pastorate into a loyal, stable preaching ministry. With that Calvin was better equipped to deal with the opposition which tried to discredit and remove him. In 1546, the influx of refugees became the initial focus for his opponents, some of them well-placed Genevan citizens. In the gathering storm, the affair of Servetus (Miguel Servet) was one of several in which it was difficult for Calvin to strike the right note. Servetus was a physician from the Basque country who had fled the Inquisition, and whom Calvin already knew for his unorthodox opinions on the ‘sleep’ of the soul after death. Servetus published a translation of the Bible in 1542 which drew on Jewish, Gnostic, pantheistic and Neo-Platonic traditions of biblical exegesis. Shortly thereafter he wrote his main work of systematic theology, the Restitution of Christianity. Servetus hoped that his anti-Trinitarian theology would serve as a way of reuniting the Jews to Christianity. Copies circulated before it was published – Sozzini was among those who knew of it. Calvin’s reaction, when he was sent some passages in 1547 for comment was hostile. When the book was published in 1553, it carried Calvin’s comments in a preface. He was incensed at having his name linked to a work that he regarded as blasphemous, sought to have it banned at the Frankfurt book fair, and alerted the ecclesiastical authorities in France (where Servetus was living) through an intermediary to have its author arrested. Servetus escaped to Geneva, where he was arrested and imprisoned in August 1553.
There had to be a trial. Calvin was represented at it by his secretary, Nicolas de la Fontaine. Written and oral testimony was presented, and Servetus defended himself with ability. The Genevan ministers concentrated on passages from Servetus’s earlier works to prove that his interpretation of the Trinity was blasphemous, and thereby punishable by death. Blasphemy, however, was difficult to demonstrate, especially when the individual in question had hardly set foot in Geneva and was not an inhabitant. Calvin brought in the big guns of other Reformed churches to lean on the magistrates, who pronounced the guilty verdict on 27 October 1553, and Servetus was burned to death that same day. The affair haunted Calvin for the rest of his life. He published a treatise that sought to out those (especially in the Italian exile community) who might be tempted to think as Servetus had done. Then he tackled head on the right of magistrates to punish heretics. Trying not to sound like Alfonso de Castro, he distinguished between coercing people’s beliefs and defending true doctrine. When it came to the latter, Calvin claimed biblical authority for the obligation of princes to use the sword to maintain right religion in the community.
Early the following year came a frontal assault on Calvin in a book by Castellio entitled Concerning Heretics and Whether They Should Be Persecuted, published under an assumed name and with a false imprint. The main body of the work was a miscellany of texts, mostly from the writings of the Protestant reformers (including Calvin), in which they opposed the use of the death penalty for heretics. The dedication (to Duke Christoph of Württemberg) began with an imaginary scene. Suppose the duke announced a visit to his subjects and ordered them to put on a white garment in his honour. Imagine his reaction when he found them quarrelling among themselves, stabbing and killing one another in his name, and not a white shirt in sight. Would he not find this reprehensible? Yet, if Christ (who had himself been executed for heresy) returned to earth, that is what he would encounter. Christians should look into their own souls and not condemn others. The role of magistrates was to maintain civil society, not judge theology. The work quickly gained a hearing in France. Had not Calvin sold a pass, justifying anything that the French king might do to Protestants in the name of maintaining right religion in his own kingdom?
In Geneva, opposition focused on the question of whether exile newcomers should be allowed to purchase the rights and status of bourgeois in the city. To allow them to do so would provide a windfall to the city treasury, but at the same time it would change the city’s political composition and consolidate Calvin’s grip since they were his adherents. Genevans opposed to Calvin attempted an insurrection on the night of 18 May 1555 but it failed. Its leaders were put on trial and executed; others fled into exile. The magistrates admitted an influx of refugees into the bourgeoisie and the political complexion of the city was transformed in Calvin’s favour. For the last decade of his life (he died in 1564), Calvin’s Reformation in Geneva was politically secure.
Calvin preached (stenographers copying down what he said) week in, week out. He ranged over the issues of the day, brought them to the doorsteps of Genevans and raised the expectations and commitments of what Reformation entailed. The magistrates enforced the efforts of the Church with legal enactments that changed public life. They outlawed dancing, controlled theatrical performances, limited the names allowed at baptism, and increased the penalties for promiscuity, blasphemy and drunkenness. It was not all repressive, though. When it came to matrimonial legislation, which Calvin helped to draft, the resulting ordinances were practical-minded and liberal. They lowered the age of majority, acknowledged the place of women in the choice of spouse and allowed for divorce in certain circumstances. The consistory court turned Calvin’s Reformation into a social transformation. It met weekly, with the numbers of cases brought before the elders growing year on year, almost until Calvin’s death. That increase explains why Genevans felt that the Church was becoming more intrusive in their lives. Geneva’s reputation as a godly ‘New Jerusalem’ spread widely, as admired by its advocates as it was ridiculed by its detractors. Florimond de Raemond, Montaigne’s contemporary as a magistrate in Bordeaux, sneered at the French Protestant exiles flocking to the place they called ‘Hieropolis’ (Holy City).
FAILED REPRESSION, RETARDED REFORMATION
After 1539, the French Reformation presented contemporaries with a paradox. The most powerful state in Europe committed itself to repression and failed. With the Edict of Fontainebleau (June 1540) heresy became a state crime, the legislation being strengthened through to the comprehensive Edict of Châteaubriant (1551). France did not need an Inquisition because its magistrates and local governors served the turn. The brutal extermination of the Vaudois (Waldensians) in April 1545 at Mérindol (in Provence) and Cabrières (in the enclave of the Comtat Venaissin) furnished the proof. Yet, even this exceptional case exemplified the difficulties of repression since those responsible were in turn investigated by a special judicial tribunal for abuse of power. This was just one sign of the incoherence of French repression. Those fearing judicial investigation could always (temporarily) make it across the border to the communities of exiles in the Rhineland and western Swiss margins in the late 1540s and 50s. From 1549, Geneva kept a register of the refugees who applied to become resident (habitant) in the city. It included over 5,000 names up to 1560 – mostly heads of households. The total number of exiles must have been more than twice that – doubling the indigenous population of the city.
Legislation was too little, too late. That was particularly evident in the control of Protestant printed literature. Up to the early 1540s, the French authorities had it more or less under control. Then a group of mainly Paris printers put their expertise to good use in Genevan exile, remodelling the market and favouring the large-scale diffusion of Calvin’s works as well as the Genevan Bibles and Psalters. Not only did the French authorities fail to stop barrel-loads of merchandise making their way across the border, or pedlars taking them to fairs and markets, but they could not unwind the lines of credit that Geneva offered to its retailers, let alone the networks of correspondents by which manuscripts entered the kingdom. After 1555 indigenous Protestant presses established a foothold in Lyon and Rouen, ready to satisfy the demand in the ‘wonder years’ of French Protestantism of 1560–62. By the 1550s, the French judiciary was investigating fewer suspects and condemning even fewer of them. Even the transfers of prisoners from one jurisdiction to another became imperilled by the ability of Protestant vigilante groups to ambush and release them.
Heresy legislation at home was failing but France’s political leaders seemed not to notice. Their sights were set on what was happening abroad, and the royal commitment to the pursuit of heresy had always been subject to the countervailing pressures of international diplomacy. French foreign policy east of the Rhine depended on the support of German, mainly Protestant, princes. Even after the death of Marguerite of Navarre in 1551, Henry II continued to be indulgent towards those in his entourage with dissident opinions. There was a naive sense of optimism among France’s governing groups about their ability to foreclose, if necessary, upon heresy. For their part, French magistrates were anxious not to create martyrs. The judges understood that the exemplary value of extreme punishment was easily negated by a culture of martyrdom. The Christian martyr was a familiar figure, perpetuated by hagiographical traditions. But the judicial repression of heresy created a theatre of martyrs. And there were Protestants willing to play that role. On 23 August 1554, the Genevan printer Jean Crespin presented a compilation of their trials to the magistrates in Geneva, asking for permission to publish it. Anxious about its rhetorical impact, they recommended that the words ‘saints’ and ‘martyrs’ be replaced with less loaded terms. Calvin weighed in against them and Crespin’s book was published without changes. In his preface, Crespin insisted on the pedagogic value of martyr narratives. Better than an old-fashioned saint’s reliquary, a martyrology recounted the experiences of contemporaries – ordinary people, flesh and blood, placed in extraordinary circumstances, defending and explaining themselves as best they could, witnessing to faith while knocking a nail in the coffin of the authority that judged them. The Book of Martyrs was a compulsive read. Regularly expanded and reprinted to 1609, it contributed to the common patrimony of Protestant martyrologies.
Protestantism in France became indistinguishable from the spread of Calvinism after the end of the 1540s. Calvinism provided a language of opposition: critical, caricatural and convinced. In Agen, for example, the school headmaster taught his students that the lighting of candles in churches was a relic of paganism. One of those pupils later mocked a priest in the street, saying: ‘Go to work, priests, you should tend your vines!’ Another young man from the same town met ladies on their way from Mass and told them that they had ‘just received a paste God’. On All Saints’ Day 1552, a group of men gathered at the door of the cathedral in Rouen to gatecrash the sermon, crying out ‘What a Fool!’ while their companions in the pews mewed like cats. In 1559, at Provins, Catholics were openly mocked in the streets as ‘lepers’ (cagots). In cemeteries, at roadside shrines and on the exterior decor of churches, Christian imagery was desecrated in acts of anonymous iconoclasm. In Noyon, Calvin’s birthplace, a statue of Christ in the local churchyard was torn down and dragged by its feet one night in August 1547 and suspended from the gibbet in the central square of the town. Acts like this were a defiance of authority, an advertisement that those in charge could no longer control heresy. How were Catholics to respond? The priest and prolific pamphleteer of the 1550s Artus Désiré pointed the way. Turning print against the Protestants, he constructed a stereotype of these ‘storm-troopers’ (francs-taupins) of ‘deformation’, priapic prophets of Antichrist who would be eliminated in the coming cosmic battle that heralded the End Time.
Calvin’s reaction to these developments was a paradox. Rather than encouraging his fellow-countrymen to man the barricades, he held back. He wanted Calvinist communities to come together in mutual charity, but he counselled caution. Many would ‘taste God’s truth’ who would eventually ‘be lost to perdition’. They should not rush into forming churches, and they should on no account confront royal authority directly. Geneva’s missionary effort, despatching trained pastors to these congregations, began very late. As a result, the Reformation in France was not ‘made in Geneva’, and the case has even been put that Calvin botched things, his prudence leading to the growth of a movement that he could neither direct nor manage. Geneva did not impose its church order, discipline and confession on the emerging French churches. Rather, it found itself willy-nilly turned into a source of authority for the divided, scattered and leaderless churches in France which needed the doctrinal and disciplinary security Geneva provided. Little by little the French churches emerged from the shadows after 1555 in a way that neither royal authority nor Geneva could effectively control. Their leadership passed in due course to the French nobility, with consequences that were very different from anything Calvin had intended.
THE RHINELAND AND THE NETHERLANDS: MAGISTRATES, REFUGEES, REVOLUTION
The Rhineland from Basel northwards offered a Reformation haven. It is not a matter of understanding its success – for instance in Strasbourg (1529) and Frankfurt (1533) – but of explaining why it failed elsewhere. In this fragmented space, a Reformation in one place created reaction and opposition in another, with human movement, coerced or voluntary exiles, acting as convecting currents for and against the Reformation. In one instance, it got out of hand. The Rhineland was the communication corridor for the Habsburg dynastic empire, its messengers and military forces. Some areas were its hereditary lands; others served as its recruiting grounds. Where they could, these regions stood against religious change, assisted by local vested interests.
For the magistrates of Rhineland cities where the Reformation was implanted, the issue was managing change. That was not easy, especially in a place like Strasbourg, which was a breeding-ground for religious opinions of all sorts. If there was no major social unrest there, it was because the city fathers appreciated the limits of their own authority. Within its walls you might encounter, besides the majority adherents to the magisterial Reformation, steered forward by Martin Bucer until he was forced to leave in 1547, Lutherans, Sacramentarian Zwinglians, adult baptizers, spiritualists, epicureans (i.e. liberal-minded humanists), French evangelicals, émigrés from England and the Netherlands, critics of tithes, usury and monasticism, and Chiliastic millenarians.
Strasbourg was where an opinionated furrier from Schwäbisch Hall, Melchior Hofmann, encountered Anabaptism for the first time in 1529. In a commentary on the Book of Daniel, published in 1526, he announced that the Last Judgment would occur in seven years’ time. He was convinced by Ursula and Lienhard Jost and Barbara Rebstock (the ‘great prophetess of the Kalbsgasse’), all three known for their trances, that not only were the last days upon them but that he was himself the new Elijah. Hofmann proclaimed Strasbourg as the spiritual Jerusalem where Christ would set up his kingdom on earth. Imprisoned by the magistrates, Hofmann managed several times to escape to the lower Rhineland and the Netherlands to spread his messianic views. In 1533, back in Strasbourg, he courted arrest. The city’s magistrates obliged. He was just one of a stream of individuals committed to radical religious change that they had to keep an eye on.
Refugees from France, the Netherlands, England and Scotland in the Rhineland could join a ‘stranger’ church, a community set apart from the ambient Lutheranism. Fourteen such churches had a tenuous existence in the period from 1538 to 1564, the leading ones being in Strasbourg, Basel, Frankfurt and Wesel. They were self-governing congregations, open to being seduced by those in their midst who sought moral and doctrinal purity. They looked to Calvin to resolve their quarrels and became the first Calvinist churches outside Geneva. This ‘refugee Reformation’ spread outside towns. Tucked in the Vosges mountains and on the margins of the duchy of Lorraine lay the mining communities around Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in the Lièpvre valley, where mining flourished in the sixteenth century. Anabaptists from Zürich settled there in the 1530s, making a living by farming the upper valley. They were joined by German-speaking Lutheran miners and then, later on, by French-speaking Calvinist refugees. Somehow this valley of religious pluralism in the later sixteenth century survived amid the outcrops of territorialized confessional religious uniformity and confrontation all around, an exception protected from persecution by its overlord and by its own obscurity.
In the Netherlands, the challenges facing the magistrates were similar to those in Strasbourg, but with striking differences. Their overlord was Habsburg, and their wealth underwrote the emperor’s military campaigns. Ghent was the biggest city in Flanders. Antwerp, the jewel of Brabant, was not far behind it. Amsterdam, the largest town in Holland, by contrast, was a small place of not more than 2,500 houses. To a degree unique in Europe, these places’ prosperity depended on traded goods. Just as bales of Flemish cloth sold at Wittenberg market, so Luther’s works found their way to the Netherlands. Over thirty editions of his writings were translated into Dutch by 1530 – and there would be many others from Protestant reformers in both Dutch and French to cater for Walloon and Dutch markets.
The cultural attitudes of the élite percolated through to the wider cross-section of the population. People here were expected to be able to read, think and act for themselves. The surviving evidence from heresy investigations suggests the down-to-earth ways in which ordinary people understood religion. Wendelmoet Claesdochter from Monnickendam, revered by Dutch Protestants, dismissed holy unction to anoint the sick as ‘good only for salads or for greasing boots’. Eloy Pruystinck, a slater from Antwerp who visited Wittenberg in 1525 and disputed with Melanchthon, thought that everyone possessed a holy spirit, and that faith was desiring for one’s neighbour what one wanted for oneself. Plain folk echoed what they heard on the streets or in taverns – that the clergy were worthless, that fasting brought on headaches and that to say that bread and wine were turned into Christ’s body and blood was mumbo-jumbo.
How were the patrician families at Antwerp, Ghent and Amsterdam to manage such dissent? Dutch magistrates were integral to urban literate and corporate culture, epitomized by the Chambers of Rhetoric that convened artists, artisans and merchants under municipal patronage. By the middle of the sixteenth century, virtually every city in the Low Countries had one such society – Antwerp had several – and Ghent ran an annual competition for the best play-text on a chosen theme. The surviving texts reveal this civic culture. There were familiar satirical targets (worthless priests and fat monks) and moralizing tones. In the Ghent competition of 1539, the Gillyflower Chamber from Antwerp offered a play around the proposed theme: ‘What is a dying man’s supreme hope?’ Their answer was unambiguously Protestant.
Within weeks of the play’s performance, Ghent rose in revolt. Some patricians were outraged by the emperor’s attack on their privileges, symbolized by a charter that he had forced them to accept at the time of his ‘Joyous Entry’ into the city in 1515. Others belonged to evangelical circles, or were fired up by the mounting costs of ‘voluntary loans’ that Charles V had exacted. A group of guildsmen arrested patricians who were rumoured to have made secret deals with the emperor for the further infringement of the city’s privileges. To the shouts of day-labourers (the ‘Screamers’), the odious charter was cut into pieces in front of the City Hall, while a new committee of aldermen instituted changes, beginning with the compulsory sale of grain at reasonable prices. Ghent’s revolt fizzled out before the end of the year. Charles V visited the city at the beginning of Lent in 1540, rewrote its privileges and banned its Chambers of Rhetoric. Ghent epitomized the early Reformation in the Netherlands: a low-grade war of words, an outbreak of street violence and civic opposition.
Charles V was determined to stamp out heresy in the Netherlands. He succeeded, albeit at a price. As the later experience in Italy was to prove, exceptional circumstances were required for the Inquisition to be accepted. In Milan, the citizens rioted when Philip II tried to introduce it. In Naples, they threatened a revolt in 1547 leading to the temporary withdrawal of the proposal. In the Netherlands, there was similar opposition. Yet that did not prevent a troika of civil, ecclesiastical and pontifical tribunals being deployed to carry out edicts (Placarten) against Protestantism. The legislation created a hybrid definition of heresy as a form of treason, more heinous than counterfeiting coins. Once someone was convicted, there was no latitude. Penitence changed only the method of execution. Treason meant the expropriation of the property of the condemned to the state.
This was alien to the patricians, some of whom were caught in the legislation themselves. Antwerp refused to publish the anti-heresy edict of April 1550 because it demanded that no one could take up residence without a certificate for Catholicity. That compromised trade with Protestant England and the Baltic. Groningen (only incorporated into the Netherlands in 1536) also bridled at interference from Brussels. Dissidents escaped there to lie low. After 1530, heresy edicts denounced the negligence of the police or the leniency of local magistrates. It was uphill work for the special commissioners and local inquisitors appointed to investigate heresy. Given local opposition, it is the more remarkable that so many went to the scaffold – perhaps 1,300 women and men between 1523 and 1566. There was a high rate of conviction (in Flanders 60 per cent of those investigated) and remissions were rare (less than 1 per cent were released on letters of pardon). Repression removed potential Protestant leaders and brought patricians into a reluctant conformity. Where France failed, the Netherlands appeared to succeed.
That success was at the price of alienation. It did not happen openly, given the spectre of revolt and the lack of any aristocratic leadership to which the alienated could turn for support before 1560. The numbers of exiled Protestants from the Low Countries in Bremen, Basel, Emden (in time, a northern Protestant ‘Geneva’) and London grew, beginning in the 1540s. The resulting ‘stranger’ communities abroad sustained an underground network of Protestant contacts and congregations which the authorities had greater difficulty in quashing. The success of Charles V’s persecution deprived the fledgling Protestant movement of those who would naturally have been its conservative leaders. In so doing, it opened the door to an Anabaptist movement that was less dependent on élites. Precisely because the Anabaptist movement in the Netherlands lacked a civic leadership which would have kept it in check, it developed a radical potential that was to be found nowhere else.
So Melchior Hofmann’s apocalyptic message had an impact among Dutch artisans. Hofmann visited East Friesland, rebaptizing adults in Emden and elsewhere in 1530. He called on them to ‘separate themselves from the world’ through the ‘true sign of the covenant’ (rebaptism) in order to be among those saved in the coming Apocalypse. One of his disciples, Jan Volkertszoon, a clog-maker from Hoorn, returned to Amsterdam. Under the noses of the authorities, he rebaptized those whom he persuaded to ‘forsake the world and the flesh, to cleave to God and to love their neighbour’. He was eventually executed at The Hague in December 1531 along with others. Shocked, Melchior Hofmann ordered rebaptism to cease until, as he expected, the Apocalypse occurred in 1533.
Jan Matthys, a baker from Haarlem who had been rebaptized by Hofmann, did not follow that lead. Convincing himself and his fellow Melchiorites in Amsterdam that he was the true Enoch, the Prophet foretold in Revelation, he rebaptized those who came to him on All Saints’ Day 1533 and left his first (‘shrewish’) wife for another. He then despatched his followers, two by two, to proclaim the coming of the Apocalypse. Two of these apostles, Gerrit Boeckbinder and Jan van Leyden, sailed across the Zuider Zee to Münster, the episcopal city to the east of the Netherlands which had recently turned Protestant. Arriving there in January 1534, they announced themselves as Enoch and Elijah and proclaimed it as the New Jerusalem, Matthys joining them a month later along with other Dutch Anabaptists. A ‘Great Exodus’ followed. Between 14,000 and 16,000 believers from Holland gathered for the flight from ‘Egypt’. Twenty-seven ships with about 3,000 aboard left Monnickendam and arrived at the Zwarte Water river near Genemuiden (Overijssel), where many were promptly captured and disarmed. No one resisted, because they expected Jeremiah to take them into the land of Canaan. In Münster, Matthys rebaptized the majority of the population with the encouragement of Berndt Knipperdollinck, a cloth merchant and one of the two new burgomasters elected to the Anabaptist city council on 22 February 1534.
There then began a Reformation like none other. Monasteries and churches were looted and images were smashed. Under the pressure of a siege from forces organized by the bishop and Westphalian princes, Lutherans and Catholics who refused to be rebaptized were expelled. Their property was placed in central warehouses, silver melted down to make coins inscribed with: ‘The Word of God made Flesh Lives in Us’. Inhabitants were enjoined to call one another ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and to live in a community bound by love. Communal ownership of commodities was established along with publicly directed labour services. A blacksmith who challenged the legality of proceedings was stabbed and then shot by Jan Matthys in a town council meeting.
After Easter 1534, Jan Bockelson ran naked through the town and fell into a silent ecstasy. When his speech returned three days later, he called for a new Sanhedrin government of the city by twelve apostolic elders. In the legal code which followed in August, Bockelson proposed polygamous marriage on the biblical precept of ‘increase and multiply’. The proposal was not immediately accepted by the elders and it was only after an uprising that it was made law. In September, Bockelson was proclaimed ‘Prophet-King of Zion’. The streets and gates of the town were renamed in celebration of the New Jerusalem. Sundays and feast-days were abolished and the days of the week reconfigured alphabetically. Divara, Bockelson’s chief wife, was proclaimed queen and she held court with him in the marketplace, which was where the throne of New Jerusalem was erected. Pamphlets in support of the Anabaptist kingdom were smuggled out to encourage risings elsewhere. In Amsterdam eleven naked streakers (Naaktloopers) ran round the streets to proclaim the ‘naked truth’ of what was happening in Münster. The siege lasted seventeen months before the city capitulated on 24 June 1535. The Anabaptists were promised safe quarter but their leaders were put to death. Knipperdollinck and others were publicly tortured with red-hot irons, their bodies suspended from the tower of St Lambert’s church in cages, which remain there still. Jan Bockelson was found in a cellar. For several months thereafter he was paraded in shackles around Germany as an object of curiosity before he too was tortured to death.
The Melchiorites are the unloved foster-children of the Reformation. Catholics used Münster as a sign that the Reformation was the instrument of the Devil. Magisterial Protestantism disowned it at every opportunity. Within Anabaptist historiography the Melchiorites have been sidelined as an illegitimate and unrepresentative brand. In reality, Melchiorite Anabaptism was not entirely defeated at Münster. It lived on for a time among the sect which acknowledged Jan van Batenburg, the bastard son of a minor nobleman from Gelderland, as the new David. The Batenburgers believed that the kingdom of God would be established by military power and thought polygamy was legitimate. Melchior Hofmann went on smuggling pamphlets out of his Strasbourg cell, singing ‘woe on you godless scribes of Strasbourg’. Among those caught up in the events at Münster was Menno Simons, a priest at Witmarsum. Convinced that there was no biblical justification for infant baptism, Simons preached against those ‘false teachers’ who ‘traffic in strange doctrine’ and usurp the role of Christ the King. It was under his influence that Dutch Anabaptism was led towards ‘spiritual resurrection’, about which he wrote eloquently, a new birth which comes when one is reborn into God’s family. The emphasis that he placed on the family and upon spiritual struggle had its impact on others in Dutch separatist congregations, notably David Joris and Hendrik Niclaes, whose ‘Family of Love’ percolated into unlikely places in the sixteenth century, including small English towns and Elizabeth I’s court. The Münster rising was a reminder of what the Protestant Reformation had stirred up but not settled: the sources and guarantees of theological, social and political order and God’s plan for the world.
REFORMATION IMPORTS
In eastern-central Europe, the Protestant Reformation was an import, dependent on propitious circumstances for its success, particularly on its adaptation to the linguistic and cultural milieu, on local support and on the fortuitous outcome of the conflicts that it raised. The guardians of tradition and legitimacy proved critical to the success or otherwise of the proselytizers of the new faith. Knowing what was to happen later (a Catholic revival and the Thirty Years War), it is easy to ignore the fact that there were significant regions (northern Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Lusatia, the Baltic littoral, parts of Greater Poland, northern and eastern Hungary) where the Catholic Church was reduced to an ineffectual minority. The largest Protestant church building in the sixteenth century was St Mary’s in Gdansk – a huge brick barn beside which the Polish monarchy was constrained to erect a small Catholic chapel so that it had somewhere to worship when it visited the port.
Protestantism challenged not only the Catholic Church but also royal authority. The elective monarchies of eastern Europe mainly clung on to the old religion – associating it with the traditions and mythologies that surrounded their rule. Only the voivodes (i.e. palatine rulers) of Transylvania, a new dominium that emerged after the battle of Mohács, adopted the Protestant religion. The Polish crown, however, was twice occupied by those who had accepted Protestantism before they were elected to it: in 1575 by István Báthory, Zápolya’s successor in Transylvania, and then in 1587 by Sigismund III Vasa, king of Poland.
The elective monarchies depended for their authority on the local Estates. In Bohemia and its associated crown lands (Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia), in Poland, Hungary and in the Austrian archduchies, power lay with the nobility. The result was a partially emasculated Church and a tendency to concede religious determination to a local level and accept the reality of the pluralism that resulted in the name of guaranteeing noble privilege. In Poland, King Sigismund II Augustus surrendered whatever may have been his personal inclinations to the necessity of the entente with the Polish Diet. A decree of 1555 and further decisions of 1562–3 weakened Church courts. By 1569, when Protestants almost equalled Catholics in the Polish Senate, some deal had to be struck. In January 1573, the Confederation of Warsaw (signed by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox representatives) agreed a mutual peace between the various religions. Its terms were confirmed by Henry of Valois at his election to the Polish throne in 1573, and then by his three successors, thereby almost turning it into a fundamental law.
In Bohemia, royal military and financial authority was also dependent on agreement with the Bohemian Diet. Laws were enacted only with the approval of these Estates and both the Supreme Court and the provincial government were composed of representatives of the nobility. The latter acquired much of the wealth of the clergy and the authority to nominate to local benefices. If they nominated Protestant ministers, nobody could stop them. In Moravia, the Diet, the sovereign judicial court and local officialdom were all in the hands of local nobility. The latter had no difficulty in resisting King Ferdinand I’s attempts to reimpose Catholicism. It was the governor of Moravia, Wenceslaus Ludanic, who, at the Diet of Brünn in 1550, defended evangelical teaching and reminded the king of his coronation oath. Facing a majority vote against him, Ferdinand accepted a negotiated religious pluralism which made Moravia the avatar for the Peace of Augsburg in the Holy Roman Empire.
Protestantism prospered in eastern-central Europe, where it won over the local nobility. It was on their lands and under their influence that it thrived – spectacularly so on the estates and with the patronage of Prince Nicholas Radziwiłł, Voivode of Livonia, Grand Hetman of Lithuania and a gatekeeper for Calvinism in Poland. It flourished more modestly under the influence of magnates like Count Stefán Schlik and members of his family, who had founded the silver mine at Joachimsthal and had estates in the region around Loket in western Bohemia. The Schliks established Protestant grammar schools and employed Lutheran ministers. Here, as elsewhere, Protestantism accompanied imported German know-how in glass manufacture, linen and textiles.
The importation can be measured through the efforts to produce vernacular Bibles. Fundamental to the success of the Protestant endeavour, it was compromised by the linguistic diversity of these regions and by the fact that many of the languages in question had unstable written forms and, in Slav, a variety of alphabets. The commercialization of book production (which secured its success in western Europe) was compromised in the east by the small markets for individual translations, and the underdeveloped printing and distribution infrastructures. Production was all the more dependent, therefore, on aristocratic patronage, the collaboration of clerics and the availability of vernacular translations. In some places, that had not happened at all by 1650. There was no Bible translation into Macedonian or Bulgarian before the nineteenth century, no Estonian Bible before 1739, and the first Latvian translation appeared in 1689. The first Finnish New Testament came in 1553, but the complete Bible followed only in 1642. Remarkable, by contrast, was the achievement of Primož Trubar, the Protestant reformer from Carniola. Working in exile, he produced the first two printed books in Slovene, a Protestant catechism and a learn-to-read manual, before going on to complete a translation of the New Testament. It lies alongside that of Antonius Dalmata (Anton Dalmatin), who, with Stipan Consul, achieved the first translation and printing (in glagolitic characters) of the Croatian New Testament, at Tübingen in 1562. Only in Bohemia was this effort anything other than uphill. Uniquely in eastern-central Europe, Bohemia had a pre-Reformation vernacular Hussite Bible and a church organization to resource new translations. Two partial ones preceded the comprehensive New Testament in Czech of Jan Blahoslav, which began to appear in 1564 and in due course became part of the Kralice Bible (1579), funded and coordinated by the Czech Unity of Brethren.
In eastern-central Europe Protestantism spread through Germanic culture. Communities of German merchants dominated the Hanseatic towns of the Baltic littoral. German miners worked in Bohemia and Hungary, and Saxon nobles had estates and interests in northwestern Bohemia. Through their efforts Protestant gymnasia were established, the pride of towns such as Elbing and Joachimsthal. But Protestantism also infiltrated indirectly, by means of mercantile contact and through students from eastern Europe studying at Wittenberg (there were eighty-eight from Bohemia there in 1530) and, increasingly after 1550, in the Calvinist academies in Germany. There were also communities of German extraction in eastern-central Europe whose affinities to that culture drew them to Lutheranism. Kežmarok, a town settled by Saxons in the thirteenth century, stands in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains in northern Hungary. Its priest, Thomas Preisner, read out Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses from the pulpit in 1521. The events of the Reformation were followed closely in the German-influenced mining towns of what is now central Slovakia (Banská Štiavnica, Kremnica, Banská Bystrica). That influence mostly did not extend to an elaborate Church organization beyond the local level, although ordinances, a common order of services and a confession emerged in the early 1530s in the Hanseatic towns of the Baltic, and later in Bohemia, Hungary and Poland as confessional differences made their mark.
People aligned themselves religiously in accordance with their attitude towards German culture, which limited the spread of Protestantism. Magyars, Slavs, Croats, Slovenes and Poles did not identify with it. Jews looked to Judaism for their identity, Ruthenians to Orthodox Christianity, Tatars to Islam. Where the Reformation aligned itself with indigenous identities, it was in its dissident forms, both because Protestant dissidents tended to be driven out towards the extremities, and because they too identified with Protestantism that was not German Lutheran. So in Hungary there would be a significant Anabaptist presence as well as a vigorous Calvinism. Transylvania would become a Calvinist state in the later sixteenth century.
In Poland, too, Calvinism was the form of Protestantism that made the greatest impact, partly thanks to the efforts of Jan Łaski (John à Lasco). The only Polish Protestant theologian with an international reputation, he had spent time in Basel and Emden among the ‘stranger’ churches before becoming superintendent to the ‘stranger’ congregation in London from 1550 to 1553, where his ingenuity was put to good use in settling quarrels and framing constitutions and confessions that met its needs. Leaving at the accession of Mary Tudor with a shipload of refugees, he settled in Brandenburg before returning to his native Poland in 1556. There, he put his talents to good use, lobbying in high places (he became a secretary to King Sigismund II Augustus), winning over Polish gentry to Calvinism, and bringing together the Lutherans, Calvinists and exiled Bohemian Brethren into a common agreement at Sandomierz in 1570. That was an accord framed against the anti-Trinitarians (i.e. Unitarians), a force to be reckoned with. In Poland, they had split off from the fledgling Calvinist Church in 1556 and established themselves as the ‘Ecclesia Minor’ or ‘Polish Brethren’, while, in Transylvania, Voivode John Sigismund Zápolya made no secret of his Unitarian leanings. Fausto Sozzini, Łaski’s equal as a theologian, spent the winter of 1578–9 as the personal guest of George Biandrata, the physician to the Transylvanian court at Cluj-Napoca, before moving on to Poland, where he became a spokesman for the Polish Brethren, feared by his critics and a thorn in the side of confessionalized Protestantism.
The Reformation in eastern-central Europe moulded itself to established ethnic, political and social contours. It was anaemic, created no martyrs and lacked a divisive edge. Bohemia was the exception. Its indigenous Reformation had occurred in the previous century. It already had a new religious doctrine (that of Jan Hus), ‘Utraquist’ (in utroque specie, in both kinds, bread and wine) churches independent of the papacy, and the potential for radical change among Taborite sects with their social theology. By 1520, however, Taborite radicalism was a spent force, channelled into the Unity of Brethren, which rejected violence and concentrated instead on the spiritual struggle within. Although they had bishops and elders, the Brethren were, as their name suggests, an affiliation of congregations in which the laity had the upper hand. The Utraquist Church became a Czech clerical establishment, cautious to the point of myopia when it came to embracing Lutheranism. Only a minority within the Utraquist Church was open to Protestantism. Among the Unity of Brethren, however, a rapprochement with Lutheran Protestantism occurred. In 1535, their confession of faith reflected the Augsburg Confession and they drew strength from their affinities with the Lutherans in Germany.
The noble leaders in the Bohemian Estates tried to turn those affinities into a political movement in 1547. King Ferdinand used the opportunity of a fire in the archives to rewrite the terms on which he had been elected to imply a hereditary principle. In response (rashly, since they had no support from Moravia, Hungary or elsewhere), they declared their backing for John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and the Schmalkaldic League, denied the request from Ferdinand for men and arms to aid the imperial cause and rose in revolt. The League’s defeat at Mühlberg in April 1547 signalled their own. The Brethren, the towns and prominent German Lutherans paid the price of the rebellion. The Brethren were exiled (some of them seeking refuge in Moravia, others in southern Poland), while the towns lost their self-government and Lutheran counts were dispossessed of their property. The nobility in general was pardoned and the ‘liberties and privileges’ of the Estates openly maintained, but with a significant caveat. In their ‘Recess’ (resolution) upon the land ordinance of 1549, the nobility of the Bohemian Estates accepted that ‘the privilege of the Bohemian lands embodies this principle, that the eldest son of each king shall become king of Bohemia after the death of his father’. Eastern-central Europe would be largely spared the political instability that occurred in western Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century. But this clause implying the end of the elective monarchy in Bohemia returned to haunt the nobility seventy years later at the beginning of the Thirty Years War.
The Reformation in the British Isles was also largely an importation from abroad. Unlike eastern Europe, the area was dominated by strong monarchies – the Tudors south of the border and the newly strengthened Stuarts to the north. That masks the degree to which it was influenced from outside, not least because the Reformation began with an ‘Act of State’, the ‘Great Matter’ of King Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. By the law of consequences much followed thereafter. Henry VIII’s divorce came at the wrong moment for both the papacy and Emperor Charles V (who was Catherine’s nephew) and they mishandled it. Papal authority in England was dismantled by legal means, steered through the English Parliament by the king’s minister, Thomas Cromwell. The Act in Restraint of Appeals (abolishing legal appeals to Rome, 1533) declared that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly . . . expressed that this realm of England is an empire’ – an assertion of the English monarch as the equal of the emperor, with an imperial (closed) crown to prove it. In addition, it envisaged that empire as a ‘body politic . . . divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality’ which owed the king a ‘natural and humble obedience’. The Act of Supremacy (1534) declared the king ‘by authority of this present Parliament . . . the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’.
Cromwell made the most of this supremacy and dissolved the monastic fabric of England in a little under five years in the face of popular resistance. None of this, however, amounted to a proper Protestant Reformation. Henry VIII’s regime was never short on advertising itself, both to its subjects and abroad. A copy of Stephen Gardiner’s On True Obedience (1535) and the Henrician Protestation found their way into every ambassadorial briefcase. The pope had earlier rewarded King Henry with the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ after his Defence of the Seven Sacraments. So Henry sought to preserve the common faith of Christendom, albeit within a monarchical-led Church, shorn of those elements that had aroused the wrath of its critics. Lutheranism did not enter into the Supreme Head. Those around him more open to evangelical opinions (such as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer) quietly tore their hair out or became victims of the cut and thrust of Henrician politics (Anne Boleyn, Cromwell). Among the minority of early English enthusiasts for the Reformation was an Oxford-trained academic, William Tyndale, whose Protestant evangelism took him abroad, almost certainly to Wittenberg as well as to the Rhineland. There, he translated the Bible into memorably plain English (with a trace of his Gloucester roots). Henry VIII hated it, and so did Sir Thomas More. The latter was in the Tower of London by the time of Tyndale’s arrest. If More did not pay the person who ultimately betrayed Tyndale, then the king himself was the instrument of his execution by inquisitors in the Low Countries.
Henry VIII could not, however, will what happened beyond his grave. His son and heir, Edward VI, was a minor, nine years old in 1547. The ‘godly imp’ was given the best education money could buy. His tutors included the classical scholar John Cheke, who came out of the closet to declare for Protestantism in 1547. Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour (brother of Jane Seymour, King Edward’s mother and Henry VIII’s third wife), became Protector and the king’s council was a roll-call of those whose Protestantism had, like Cheke’s, been well hidden. The Reformation experiment that occurred in the six years from 1547 to 1553 was a borrowed one, ‘act two of a continental drama played out earlier and on a different stage’, as a recent historian put it. But it was eclectic, the result eccentric and resisted locally.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer recruited theological talent abroad. In the aftermath of the imperial victory at Mühlberg it was a good time to be looking. Bernardino Ochino was smuggled out of Augsburg, given a new suit of clothes and the books he asked for, provided with a non-resident post at Canterbury and attached to the ‘stranger’ church in London. His writings, suitably translated, had a big impact. His fellow-countryman Peter Martyr Vermigli was recruited to a post in Oxford. The bishops were his friends – Latimer, Ridley, Ponet and Hooper. It was his theology of the Eucharist that was mediated through Cranmer into the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. Other foreigners included Martin Bucer (a chair in Cambridge), the Hebraist Immanuel Tremellius (Tremellio – one of Vermigli’s colleagues from Lucca) and Jan Łaski – all part of Cranmer’s idea (which emerged in March 1552) for a general council of the Church that would trump the Council of Trent. The project never got off the ground and England’s Protestant experiment was caught short with Edward VI’s sudden death in 1553. Among the unfinished business was the ‘Reformation of the Laws’, the project to replace canon law on which Vermigli, William Cecil and others spent a great deal of energy. In that sense, as in others, England was not more than half-Reformed by the time of the king’s death.
His successor, Mary Tudor, came to power in a coup against a Protestant minority, determined to try to hang on through advancing the claims of Lady Jane Grey, who was rapidly caught and executed by forces loyal to Mary. That minority knew the vulnerability of the English Protestant experiment. Thomas Cranmer advised Vermigli and others to leave the country in September 1553. As they packed their bags, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, with the bishops of London and Worcester, were marched off to prison, round one of the operation to undo the Protestant Reformation. Everything depended on targeting the organizational fabric of Protestantism, using the supremacy of the English state over its Church against it, and winning the battle to secure a particular view of ‘true obedience’. It was achieved with the re-imported talent of Cardinal Reginald Pole, who arrived back as cardinal legate in November 1554. No one knew better, given his Italian experience, how to articulate that obedience in such a way that the key debate under Mary was not about winning hearts and minds, but about securing conformity. We shall never know how successful the campaign to re-Catholicize England would have been; it was truncated by the death of Mary in November 1558. Over 300 people were burned at the stake – mainly in the south of the country. Others left the country to join the ‘refugee Reformation’ in the Rhineland and in Switzerland, one of them being John Foxe, the English martyrologist. His efforts to document the Marian persecution and set it in the context of the wider pattern of God’s intervention in history became part of Protestant England’s birthright.
What Foxe does not tell us is that, by 1558, the authorities had despatched most of the Protestant leadership that had stayed behind, and were mopping up the remnants – the ‘sustainers’ of the movement – harder to find, but by then quiescent. Had Mary lived longer, it is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which English Protestantism would have easily revived. It would have had no help from France or the Low Countries. In Scotland, the regency of Mary of Lorraine (1543–61) was just culminating with the marriage of her daughter (Mary Stuart) to the Valois dauphin, Francis II, in 1558. With the establishment of common Franco-Scottish nationality in 1557, Scotland seemed destined to be part of a French dynastic empire. The accession of Elizabeth I to the English throne in November 1558 turned everything on its head. A period of unparalleled instability in the politics of western Europe was beginning. With it emerged transnational, politico-religious affiliations that sought to create Christian commonwealths in Europe that were very different from the Christendom of the past.