Reformation

I

Introduction

Reformation, general term, sometimes applied to the complex changes in Western Christendom that began in the 14th century and culminated in the 17th century, but now more commonly used to delineate the religious transformation of the 16th century which resulted in the establishment of Protestantism. This transformation was unique. It did not occur in Orthodox Russia or in the remnant of Byzantine Christianity in Greece and it is difficult to find its parallel in the other advanced civilizations of Eurasia. Protestantism set out to reform the fabric of the traditional Christian Church. Protestants wanted to change not merely the Church but also its underlying rationale for offering salvation. They sought to do so on the authority of the Bible and the example of the early Christian Church. In the process, the Reformation irrevocably split Christendom, ended the ecclesiastical supremacy of the papacy and became interwoven in complex political and social changes in European society in the 16th and 17th centuries, whose outcomes it helped to mould.

II

The Christian Church on the Eve of Reformation

Very little in late medieval Christendom prepared its leaders for the advent of the Protestant reformation. There had, of course, been medieval movements of heresy, some of which had reforming impulses that later Protestants would equate with their own. The 14th-century English reformer John Wycliffe had attacked the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, the veneration of saints’ relics, and the poor educational and moral standards of the clergy. He translated the Bible into English and his followers, known as Lollards, delivered sermons and prayed in English. Lollardy influenced the Bohemian religious reformer John Huss. Excommunicated by the papacy in 1411 and burnt at the stake in 1415, his followers, the Hussites, declared him a martyr and launched a violent movement of protest encompassing radical social as well as religious components known as the Hussite Wars (1420-1424). Yet medieval heresy was very largely contained. Lollardy in England remained localized and weak. The Hussite revolt was appeased with some concessions for a time, especially those which allowed the laity to communicate “in both kinds” (bread and wine) in the Bohemian “utraquist” Church. The connections between the Hussites and the Waldenses, an earlier medieval heresy, remained tenuous. As the great European humanist Erasmus said on the eve of the Protestant reformation, Christendom had never been more orthodox.

There was, of course, widespread criticism of the Church as an institution. But none of the criticism was new. Since the growth of the Church as a rich bureaucracy in the central Middle Ages, it had displayed all the characteristic failings of a bureaucracy. There were periodic factions and divisions in its higher echelons, a chronic failure to control the behaviour or provide for the education of its lower echelons, and a systemic inability to do more than talk about its own reform. The Babylonian Captivity (as it would become known later in Rome) of popes in Avignon (see Avignon Papacy) in the 14th century and the resulting Great Schism certainly divided and damaged the authority of the Church but it was a distant memory by the outbreak of the Protestant reformation. Ecclesiastical reform “in head and members” was discussed at a succession of Church councils from the Council of Constance to the 5th Lateran Council in Rome. These councils were not all accorded legitimacy by the papacy, which feared that its own authority would be called into question by them. The councils advertised the abuses of pluralism, simony, non-residence, and concubinage within the Church, abuses that the Protestant reformers would later exaggerate. These were failings that Europe had lived with for over a century before the Reformation; and what was regarded as scandalous to the urban and vocal critics of the Church was often of little importance to others, especially in Europe’s rural hinterlands.

Such criticism became more serious and focused when it gained support in high places in the secular courts of Europe’s princes. The latter typically challenged the papacy’s claims to tax and judge their subjects as well as its rights to appoint to senior ecclesiastical posts in their domains. In some countries, like England, these rights were unilaterally restricted by legislation. The statutes of Mortmain (1279), Provisors (1351), and Praemunire (1393) significantly reduced the potential of the Church as a landowner, its rights to appoint to ecclesiastical offices, and its rights to exercise judicial authority without appeal in its courts. Elsewhere, however, the papacy recognized the danger and negotiated a concordat, typified by that agreed between Pope Leo X and Francis I of France at Bologna in 1516. In Germany, however, the contest for supremacy between popes and emperors that had occurred in the central Middle Ages had left the papacy largely victorious. Ecclesiastical principalities played a major role in the Holy Roman Empire, senior clerics had a role in the election of emperors, and ecclesiastical taxation in Germany kept Rome solvent. The price was bitter and long-standing enmities against the Church that found their voice in the Diets—the national assemblies—of the Empire on the eve of the Reformation.

Nor was it clear that humanism, a new way of learning that had begun to appear in 15th-century Italy, would necessarily damage the authority of the traditional Church. It is true that humanist scholars recovered and showed the relevance of pre-Christian classical antiquity to contemporaries. Their techniques of textual criticism could equally be applied to documents that formed the basis for Church teaching. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla used his position as papal secretary to demonstrate that the famous Donation of Constantine, a text often used by the papacy to support its claims to temporal authority, was a forgery. They helped to educate new generations of lay elites in Europe to be critical of ecclesiastical pretensions. At the same time, the invention of printing with movable metal type increased exponentially the circulation of books and ideas in Europe in a way that often lay beyond the capacity of either ecclesiastical or secular authorities effectively to control.

But these were developments that were not automatically or necessarily damaging to the Church. The debates over the value of pre-Christian learning added another layer to already complex debates within medieval scholastic philosophy about the extent to which human beings could know anything. These debates had already fed through into academic arguments in the late medieval Church about the degree to which human beings could be saved by virtue of their own merits and actions as opposed to God’s grace. Humanists like Desiderius Erasmus sought to show how humanism and the new philology, aided by the new printing press, could be used as forces for Christian renewal within the church. Some of Erasmus’ fellow humanists, like Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples in France or Johann Reuchlin in Germany would end up being evangelically minded sympathizers towards Martin Luther. Others, however, like Sir Thomas More in England, would end up on the scaffold in defence of the traditional Church and its authority. In general, the Church continued to play a significant role in the education of Europe’s elites. It did not automatically resist the new printing presses, although it did see dangers in the unbridled spread of vernacular Bibles among the unlearned. Luther’s protest would create a Protestant image of the pre-reformation Church as corrupt, decadent, and ripe for reform. In truth, it was a complex organization struggling to come to terms with a Europe whose political basis and (especially urban) fabric was beginning to change fundamentally. And Luther’s protest took Germany and Europe by storm, not because it was long awaited but because it was unanticipated and in large measure misread by the authorities.

III

The Protestant Reformation: Outbreak and Evolution

A

Germany

The Protestant revolution began, inconspicuously enough, with the issuing of the Ninety-Five Theses by the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, in October 1517. Luther challenged the claims of preachers who offered indulgences for sale, asserted his views about the nature of true penance, and implicitly questioned the authority of the papacy. The theses were published without his knowledge or permission and became an instant bestseller. The Dominicans led the opposition to him and he was summoned to Rome to face investigation. But, in January 1519, the Holy Roman Emperor died, and, in the face of support for Luther from his own prince (Frederick the Wise), who was one of the electors of the Emperor and thus in a politically sensitive position, the papacy was forced to suspend its summons.

By the time the new emperor had been elected (June 1519), events had begun to acquire a momentum of their own. Luther replied to his critics by becoming more intransigent and broadening the basis of his critique of the Church to include canon law. By 1520 the main lines of his remarkable Bible-based theology were clear. Salvation depended on a direct encounter with God in the Bible through reading it and hearing the word preached. Rightly understood, it was a message that empowered ordinary men, women, and children, and freed them from the papacy, which he now regarded as the Antichrist. In December 1520 he publicly burned the bull (or papal decree) that excommunicated him and also, for good measure, a book of canon law. The new emperor, Charles V, summoned Luther to the Diet at Worms in 1521 and ordered him to renounce the heretical propositions in his writings. Luther refused and he was declared an outlaw of the Empire. Closeted in a remote castle for almost a year for his own protection, Luther became a potent symbol and his writings were openly sold, despite imperial prohibition, and widely read. It has been estimated that some 300,000 copies in total of Luther’s various treatises were in circulation in Germany in the early 1520s, or rather less than one for each literate person (the latter probably amounted to less than 5 per cent of the population at large) in the Empire. Not that literacy was an absolute prerequisite, since the evangelical reformation made great use of woodcuts and engravings to represent the essential message to those whose literacy was minimal or even non-existent.

Historians have called this enthusiasm an evangelical movement and the term accurately evokes the Bible-based reforming enthusiasm that the Luther affair had generated. But we should not place too much emphasis on the written word, remarkable though the sudden flood of evangelical pamphlets in Germany during the years from 1520 to 1525 turned out to be, or even upon Luther himself. Equally important were the preachers in a variety of imperial cities and towns in the Empire who adapted versions of Luther’s message to their local environments. In this chaotic, creative decade, Luther himself struggled to come to terms with the implications of the revolt that he had started.

The Protestant Reformation divided families, neighbours, cities, and kingdoms. Its appeal transcended particular social groups and geographical regions although, for various reasons, it found linguistic boundaries more difficult to cross. One of the most remarkable features of German evangelism in the 1520s was how it reached out to the rural world. Here was where the Protestant Reformation would generally find its task the hardest. But, in these early years, and particularly in south-western Germany, eastern Switzerland, and upper Austria, it was different. Rural participation culminated in the Great Peasants’ War of 1524 to 1526. This complex, regionalized, and disparate phenomenon paralysed Germany and had a significant impact on the evolution of Lutheranism at a crucial period. The peasantry was far from immune from the changing economic burdens and challenges to their legal status that affected many of Europe’s rural communities in this period. Resentments towards such changes surfaced in the Peasants’ War in which elements of the evangelical Reformation were interwoven with peasant grievances to create a gospel of social unrest, tinged with millenarian anticipation. Much of this shocked Luther, who had initially sympathized with peasant complaints. In a pamphlet entitled Wider die Mördischen und Räubischen Rotten der Bauern (1525; “Against the Murdering Thieving Hordes of Peasants”) he berated them for resorting to violence and compromising God’s strange work in the hearts of men. The peasants were bloodily defeated in 1525 although the revolt continued into the following year in some areas. By then Luther had come to realize that the Reformation message had to be indoctrinated in the countryside more systematically. To do that, it required organization, discipline, and the support of the state. The organizational process of the Protestant Reformation began in the wake of the Peasants’ War. Reform-inclined territorial princes and imperial cities usurped the powers of bishops and took control of the churches in their own jurisdiction. Secular officials were appointed to manage ecclesiastical affairs, from the appointment of the pastor to the administration of Church funds. Annual investigations of the morality and competence of the clergy coupled with the behaviour of the laity were carried out along the lines of the model laid down by Luther’s principality of electoral Saxony in 1527.

With the evangelism of the early years fading at the end of the decade, the future of the Reformation in Germany depended on the cities and the princes. By the time of the formal “protestation” of July 19, 1529 (which gave its name to the “protestants”), published after the Diet of Speyer (see Speyer), the Reformation could claim the support of a small clutch of princes and 14 cities of the Empire. The following year, Luther’s associate at Wittenberg, the scholar and reformer Philipp Melanchthon, drafted a formal statement of the core beliefs of the Lutherans and submitted it to the Emperor at the Diet of Augsburg. His hope had been that they might be able to reconcile their differences and return to the Catholic Church, rather as the Hussite Utraquists had done the previous century. It became known as the Confessio Augustana (Latin, “Augsburg Confession”) and it came to be the basis of the Lutheran creed. It failed to effect reconciliation, but it was not the last attempt to achieve that elusive goal. By Luther’s death in 1546, however, the numbers of princes had expanded, mainly in northern Germany, and reconciliation was at an end. They were able to raise more forces than the emperor himself in the Schmalkaldic War that began that same year. But the Protestant princes failed to coordinate their military effort and this led to their military defeat in April 1547 at the Battle of Mühlberg. The political resolution of the issues between the Lutheran principalities of the Empire and the emperor had to wait until the famous Peace of Augsburg, which accepted the legal existence of Lutheranism within those polities of the Empire whose princes or governors chose to adopt it as their religion. The Reformation had come of age.

B

Switzerland

The Reformation in Switzerland was contemporaneous with that in Germany and an older historiography disputed the primacy of the latter in favour of the former. In reality, they had distinctive roots, flourished in different political climates and each fed into the other in the vital decade of the 1520s. Whereas Germany was the land of the Holy Roman Empire whose polity was dominated by an emperor and by princes, Switzerland was a confederation of largely self-governing cantons, often dominated by a city whose magistrates were used to taking decisions independently from other princes or rulers. They had finally achieved their independence from the Empire in 1495. The confederation was a loose one that had to cope with a wide variety of languages (which was not the case in Germany). Northern and eastern Switzerland (where the majority of its population lived) spoke a Swiss-German dialect. The French-speaking part was confined to the west in the cantons of Fribourg and Bern. The Swiss Romansh language was spoken in the Grisons, and some Italian too in the southern cantons. The survival of the confederation was threatened both by the business of mercenary army service and the Protestant Reformation. More Swiss as a proportion of the overall population were retained in military service to the emperor, the French king, and the papacy than in any other comparable country. The risks of rival mercenaries from different cantons dividing the confederation were real, especially when these divisions were exacerbated by religious conflict. The dangers were increased by the size of the two outer cantons of Zürich to the east and Bern to the west. Both had expansionist tendencies. Between them they cradled the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland.