Chapter 13: Reformation and Religious Wars

The Early Reformation

The Christian Church in the Early Sixteenth Century

If external religious observances are an indication of conviction, Europeans in the early sixteenth century were deeply pious. Villagers participated in processions honoring the local saints.
Despite— or perhaps because of— the depth of their piety, many people were also highly critical of the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy.
The papal conflict with the German emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century, followed by the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism, badly damaged the prestige of church leaders, and the fifteenth-century popes’ concentration on artistic patronage and building up family power did not help matters.
In the early sixteenth century, court records, bishops’ visitations of parishes, and popular songs and printed images show widespread anticlericalism, or opposition to the clergy.
In regard to absenteeism and pluralism, many clerics held several benefices, or offices, simultaneously, but they seldom visited the benefices, let alone performed the spiritual responsibilities those offices entailed.
There was also local resentment of clerical privileges and immunities.
Priests, monks, and nuns were exempt from civic responsibilities, such as defending the city and paying taxes.
This brought city leaders into opposition with bishops and the papacy, which for centuries had stressed the independence of the church from lay control and the distinction between members of the clergy and laypeople.

Martin Luther

By itself, widespread criticism of the church did not lead to the dramatic changes of the sixteenth century. Instead, the personal religious struggle of a German university professor and priest, Martin Luther (1483–1546), propelled the wave of movements we now call the Reformation.
Martin Luther was a very conscientious friar, but his scrupulous observance of religious routine, frequent confessions, and fasting gave him only temporary relief from anxieties about sin and his ability to meet God’s demands.
At the same time that Luther was engaged in scholarly reflections and professorial lecturing, Pope Leo X authorized the sale of a special Saint Peter’s indulgence to finance his building plans in Rome.
According to Catholic theology, individuals who sin could be reconciled to God by indulgence, or confessing their sins to a priest and by doing an assigned penance, such as praying or fasting.
Archbishop Albert’s indulgence sale, run by a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel who mounted an advertising blitz, promised that the purchase of indulgences would bring full forgiveness for one’s own sins or release from purgatory for a loved one.
Luther was severely troubled that many people believed they had no further need for repentance once they had purchased indulgences.
In 1517 he wrote a letter to Archbishop Albert on the subject and enclosed in Latin his “Ninety-five Theses on the Power of Indulgences.”
Whether the theses were posted or not, they were quickly printed, first in Latin and then in German translation.
Luther was ordered to come to Rome, although because of the political situation in the empire, he was able instead to engage in formal scholarly debate with a representative of the church, Johann Eck, at Leipzig in 1519.
The papacy responded with a letter condemning some of Luther’s propositions, ordering that his books be burned, and giving him two months to recant or be excommunicated.
His appearance at the Diet of Worms in 1521 created an even broader audience for reform ideas, and throughout central Europe other individuals began to preach and publish against the existing doctrines and practices of the church, drawing on the long tradition of calls for change as well as on Luther.

Protestant Thought

The most important early reformer other than Luther was the Swiss humanist, priest, and admirer of Erasmus, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531).
The followers of Luther, Zwingli, and others who called for a break with Rome came to be called Protestants.
The word Protestant derives from the protest drawn up by a small group of reforming German princes at the Diet of Speyer in 1529.
Luther, Zwingli, and other early Protestants agreed on many things.
First, traditional Catholic teaching held that salvation is achieved by both faith and good works.
Second, Christian doctrine had long maintained that authority rests both in the Bible and in the traditional teaching of the church.
Third, Protestants held that the church is a spiritual priesthood of all believers, an invisible fellowship not fixed in any place or person, which differed markedly from the Roman Catholic practice of a hierarchical clerical institution headed by the pope in Rome.
Fourth, the medieval church had stressed the superiority of the monastic and religious life over the secular.
Protestants did not agree on everything, and one important area of dispute was the ritual of the Eucharist.

The Appeal of Protestant Ideas

Pulpits and printing presses spread the Protestant message all over Germany, and by the middle of the sixteenth century people of all social classes had rejected Catholic teachings and had become Protestant.
Educated people and many humanists were much attracted by Luther’s teachings.
Scholars in many disciplines have attributed Luther’s fame and success to the invention of the printing press, which rapidly reproduced and made known his ideas.
Both Luther and Zwingli recognized that for reforms to be permanent, political authorities as well as concerned individuals and religious leaders would have to accept them.
Luther lived in a territory ruled by a noble— the elector of Saxony— and he also worked closely with political authorities, viewing them as fully justified in asserting control over the church in their territories.
Individuals may have been convinced of the truth of Protestant teachings by hearing sermons, listening to hymns, or reading pamphlets, but a territory became Protestant when its ruler, whether a noble or a city council, brought in a reformer or two to re-educate the territory’s clergy, sponsored public sermons, and confiscated church property.
This happened in many of the states of the Holy Roman Empire during the 1520s.

The Radical Reformation and the German Peasants’ War

While Luther and Zwingli worked with political authorities, some individuals and groups rejected the idea that church and state needed to be united.
Some religious radicals thought the end of the world was coming soon, and in the 1530s a group took over the German city of Münster, which they predicted would be the site of a New Jerusalem that would survive God’s final judgment.
Radical reformers sometimes called for social as well as religious change, a message that resonated with the increasingly struggling German peasantry.
In the early sixteenth century the economic condition of the peasantry varied from place to place but was generally worse than it had been in the fifteenth century and was deteriorating.
Luther wanted to prevent rebellion. Initially he sided with the peasants, blasting the lords for robbing their subjects.
But when rebellion broke out, peasants who expected Luther’s support were soon disillusioned.
The German Peasants’ War of 1525 greatly strengthened the authority of lay rulers.
Not surprisingly, the Reformation lost much of its popular appeal after 1525, though peasants and urban rebels sometimes found a place for their social and religious ideas in radical groups.

Marriage, Sexuality, and the Role of Woman

Luther and Zwingli both believed that a priest’s or nun’s vows of celibacy went against human nature and God’s commandments, and that marriage brought spiritual advantages and so was the ideal state for nearly all human beings.
Though they denied that marriage was a sacrament, Protestant reformers stressed that it had been ordained by God when he presented Eve to Adam, served as a “remedy” for the unavoidable sin of lust, provided a site for the pious rearing of the next generation of Godfearing Christians, and offered husbands and wives companionship and consolation.
Protestants did not break with medieval scholastic theologians in their idea that women were to be subject to men.
Protestants saw marriage as a contract in which each partner promised the other support, companionship, and the sharing of mutual goods.
As Protestants believed marriage was the only proper remedy for lust, they uniformly condemned prostitution.
The licensed brothels that were a common feature of late medieval urban life were closed in Protestant cities, and harsh punishments were set for prostitution.
The Protestant Reformation clearly had a positive impact on marriage, but its impact on women was more mixed.
A few women took Luther’s idea about the priesthood of all believers to heart and wrote religious works.

The Reformation and German Politics

The Rise of the Habsburg Dynasty

War and diplomacy were important ways that states increased their power in sixteenth-century Europe, but so was marriage.
Royal and noble sons and daughters were important tools of state policy.
Maximilian learned the lesson of marital politics well, marrying his son and daughter to the children of Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Spain, much of southern Italy, and eventually the Spanish New World empire.

Religious Wars in Switzerland and Germany

In the sixteenth century the practice of religion remained a public matter.
The ruler determined the official form of religious practice in his (or occasionally her) jurisdiction.
Luther’s ideas appealed to German rulers for a variety of reasons.
Though Germany was not a nation, people did have an understanding of being German because of their language and traditions.
Charles V was a vigorous defender of Catholicism, so it is not surprising that the Reformation led to religious wars.
The first battleground was Switzerland, which was officially part of the Holy Roman Empire, though it was really a loose confederation of thirteen largely autonomous territories called cantons.
Trying to halt the spread of religious division, Charles V called an Imperial Diet in 1530, to meet at Augsburg.
The Lutherans developed a statement of faith, later called the Augsburg Confession, and the Protestant princes presented this to the emperor.
The 1530s and early 1540s saw complicated political maneuvering among many of the powers of Europe.
Various attempts were made to heal the religious split with a church council, but stubbornness on both sides made it increasingly clear that this would not be possible and that war was inevitable.
Fighting began in 1546, and initially the emperor was very successful.
This success alarmed both France and the pope, however, who did not want Charles to become even more powerful.
The Peace of Augsburg ended religious war in Germany for many decades.
His hope of uniting his empire under a single church dashed, Charles V abdicated in 1556 and moved to a monastery, transferring power over his holdings in Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip and his imperial power to his brother Ferdinand.

The Spread of Protestant Ideas

Scandinavia

The first area outside the empire to officially accept the Reformation was the kingdom of Denmark-Norway under King Christian III (r. 1536–1559).
Danish scholars studied at the University of Wittenberg, and Lutheran ideas spread into Denmark very quickly.
In Sweden, Gustavus Vasa (r. 1523–1560), who came to the throne during a civil war with Denmark, also took over control of church personnel and income.
Protestant ideas spread, though the Swedish Church did not officially accept Lutheran theology until later in the century.

Henry VIII and the Reformation in England

As on the continent, the Reformation in England had economic and political as well as religious causes.
The impetus for England’s break with Rome was the desire of King Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) for a new wife, though his own motives also included political, social, and economic elements.
Henry VIII was married to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and widow of Henry’s older brother, Arthur.
Marriage to a brother’s widow went against canon law, and Henry had been required to obtain a special papal dispensation to marry Catherine.
With Rome thwarting his matrimonial plans, Henry decided to remove the English Church from papal jurisdiction.
Theologically, Henry was conservative, and the English Church retained such traditional Catholic practices and doctrines as confession, clerical celibacy, and transubstantiation.
Under the influence of his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, and the man he had appointed archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, he did agree to place an English Bible in every church.
The nationalization of the church and the dissolution of the monasteries led to important changes in government administration.
Some English people had been dissatisfied with the existing Christian Church before Henry’s measures, and Protestant literature circulated.
Loyalty to the Catholic Church was particularly strong in Ireland.
Ireland had been claimed by English kings since the twelfth century, but in reality the English had firm control of only the area around Dublin, known as the Pale.
The Roman Church was essentially driven underground, and the Catholic clergy acted as national as well as religious leaders.

Upholding Protestantism in England

In the short reign of Henry’s sickly son, Edward VI (r. 1547–1553), Protestant ideas exerted a significant influence on the religious life of the country.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer simplified the liturgy, invited Protestant theologians to England, and prepared the first Book of Common Prayer (1549), which was later approved by Parliament.
The equally brief reign of Mary Tudor (r. 1553– 1558) witnessed a sharp move back to Catholicism.
At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, sharp differences existed in England. On the one hand, Catholics wanted a Roman Catholic ruler.
On the other hand, a vocal number of returning exiles wanted all Catholic elements in the Church of England eliminated.
Shrewdly, Elizabeth chose a middle course between Catholic and Puritan extremes.
Working through Parliament, she ordered church and government officials to swear that she was supreme in matters of religion as well as politics, required her subjects to attend services in the Church of England or risk a fine, and called for frequent preaching of Protestant ideas.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century Elizabeth’s reign was threatened by European powers attempting to re-establish Catholicism.
Philip prepared a vast fleet to sail from Lisbon to Flanders, where a large army of Spanish troops was stationed because of religious wars in the Netherlands.
On May 9, 1588, la felícissima armada— “the most fortunate fleet,” as it was ironically called in official documents— composed of more than 130 vessels, sailed from Lisbon harbor.
The Spanish Armada met an English fleet in the Channel before it reached Flanders.
The battle in the English Channel has frequently been described as one of the decisive battles in world history.
In England the victory contributed to a David and Goliath legend that enhanced English national sentiment.

Calvinism

In 1509, while Luther was preparing for a doctorate at Wittenberg, John Calvin (1509– 1564) was born in Noyon in northwestern France.
Calvin believed that God had specifically selected him to reform the church.
To understand Calvin’s Geneva, it is necessary to understand Calvin’s ideas.
These he embodied in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, published first in 1536 and in its final form in 1559.
Calvin did not ascribe free will to human beings because that would detract from the sovereignty of God.
Men and women cannot actively work to achieve salvation; rather, God in his infinite wisdom decided at the beginning of time who would be saved and who damned.
This viewpoint constitutes the theological principle called predestination.
Many people consider the doctrine of predestination, which dates back to Saint Augustine and Saint Paul, to be a pessimistic view of the nature of God.
Calvin transformed Geneva into a community based on his religious principles.
The most powerful organization in the city became the Consistory, a group of laymen and pastors charged with investigating and disciplining deviations from proper doctrine and conduct.
Serious crimes and heresy were handled by the civil authorities, which, with the Consistory’s approval, sometimes used torture to extract confessions.
Geneva became the model of a Christian community for many Protestant reformers.
Religious refugees from France, England, Spain, Scotland, and Italy visited Calvin’s Geneva, and many of the most prominent exiles from Mary Tudor’s England stayed.
Calvinism became the compelling force in international Protestantism.
Calvinists believed that any occupation could be a God-given “calling,” and should be carried out with diligence and dedication.
Calvinism spread on the continent of Europe, and also found a ready audience in Scotland.
Knox was determined to structure the Scottish Church after the model of Geneva, where he had studied and worked with Calvin.
The Presbyterian Church of Scotland was strictly Calvinist in doctrine, adopted a simple and dignified service of worship, and laid great emphasis on preaching.

The Reformation in Eastern Europe

While political and economic issues determined the course of the Reformation in western and northern Europe, ethnic factors often proved decisive in eastern Europe, where people of diverse backgrounds had settled in the later Middle Ages.
The forces of the Catholic Reformation promoted a Catholic spiritual revival in Bohemia, and some areas reconverted.
This complicated situation would be one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War in the early seventeenth century.
By 1500 Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were jointly governed by king, senate, and diet (parliament), but the two territories retained separate officials, judicial systems, armies, and forms of citizenship.
The population of Poland-Lithuania was also very diverse; Germans, Italians, Tartars, and Jews lived among Poles and Lithuanians.
Hungary’s experience with the Reformation was even more complex.
Lutheranism was spread by Hungarian students who had studied at Wittenberg, and sympathy for it developed at the royal court of King Louis II in Buda.
Before such measures could be acted on, a military event on August 26, 1526, had profound consequences for both the Hungarian state and the Protestant Reformation there.
The Turks were indifferent to the religious conflicts of Christians, whom they regarded as infidels.
Christians of all types paid extra taxes to the sultan, but kept their faith.

The Catholic Reformation

Papal Reform and the Council of Trent

Renaissance popes and their advisers were not blind to the need for church reforms, but they resisted calls for a general council representing the entire church, and feared that any transformation would mean a loss of power, revenue, and prestige.
In 1542 Pope Paul III established the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, often called the Holy Office, with jurisdiction over the Roman Inquisition, a powerful instrument of the Catholic Reformation.
Pope Paul III also called a general council, which met intermittently from 1545 to 1563 at Trent, an imperial city close to Italy.
Nonetheless, the decrees of the Council of Trent laid a solid basis for the spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church.
One decision had especially important social consequences for laypeople.
The Council of Trent stipulated that for a marriage to be valid, the marriage vows had to be made publicly before a priest and witnesses.
Although it did not achieve all of its goals, the Council of Trent composed decrees that laid a solid basis for the spiritual renewal of the church.
The doctrinal and disciplinary legislation of Trent served as the basis for Roman Catholic faith, organization, and practice through the middle of the twentieth century.

New and Reformed Religious Orders

Just as seminaries provided education, so did religious orders, which aimed at raising the moral and intellectual level of the clergy and people.
New religious orders were founded, some of which focused on education.
The Ursuline order of nuns, for example, founded by Angela Merici (1474–1540), focused on the education of women.
The most significant new order was the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits.
Founded by Ignatius Loyola (1491– 1556), the Jesuits played a powerful international role in strengthening Catholicism in Europe and spreading the faith around the world.
Loyola was a man of considerable personal magnetism.
After study at universities in Salamanca and Paris, he gathered a group of six companions and in 1540 secured papal approval of the new Society of Jesus.
The Society of Jesus developed into a highly centralized, tightly knit organization.

Religious Violence

French Religious War

The costs of the Habsburg-Valois wars, waged intermittently through the first half of the sixteenth century, forced the French to increase taxes and borrow heavily.
King Francis I (r. 1515–1547) also tried two new devices to raise revenue: the sale of public offices and a treaty with the papacy.
Significant numbers of those ruled, however, were attracted to the Reformed religion of Calvinism.
Initially, Calvinism drew converts from among reformminded members of the Catholic clergy, industrious city dwellers, and artisan groups.
Most French Calvinists, called Huguenots, lived in major cities, such as Paris, Lyon, and Rouen.
The feebleness of the French monarchy was the seed from which the weeds of civil violence sprang.
The three weak sons of Henry II who occupied the throne could not provide the necessary leadership, and they were often dominated by their mother, Catherine de’ Medici.
Calvinist teachings called the power of sacred images into question, and mobs in many cities took down and smashed statues, stained-glass windows, and paintings, viewing this as a way to purify the church.
Though it was often inspired by fiery Protestant sermons, this iconoclasm, or destruction of religious images, is an example of ordinary men and women carrying out the Reformation themselves.
A savage Catholic attack on Calvinists in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572, followed the usual pattern.
What ultimately saved France was a small group of moderates of both faiths, called politiques, who believed that only the restoration of strong monarchy could reverse the trend toward collapse.
Henry’s willingness to sacrifice religious principles to political necessity saved France.
He converted to Catholicism but also issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which granted liberty of conscience and liberty of public worship to Huguenots in 150 fortified towns.

The Netherlands Under Charles V

In the Netherlands, what began as a movement for the reformation of the church developed into a struggle for Dutch independence.
Emperor Charles V had inherited the seventeen provinces that compose presentday Belgium and the Netherlands.
In the Low Countries as elsewhere, corruption in the Roman Church and the critical spirit of the Renaissance provoked pressure for reform, and Lutheran ideas took root.
By the 1560s Protestants in the Netherlands were primarily Calvinists.
Calvinism’s intellectual seriousness, moral gravity, and emphasis on any form of labor well done appealed to urban merchants, financiers, and artisans.
When Spanish authorities attempted to suppress Calvinist worship and raised taxes in the 1560s, rioting ensued.
Between 1568 and 1578 civil war raged in the Netherlands between Catholics and Protestants and between the seventeen provinces and Spain.
Eventually the ten southern provinces, the Spanish Netherlands (the future Belgium), came under the control of the Spanish Habsburg forces.
The seven northern provinces, led by Holland, formed the Union of Utrecht and in 1581 declared their independence from Spain.
Hostilities ended in 1609 when Spain agreed to a truce that recognized the independence of the United Provinces.

The Great European Witch-Hunt

The relationship between the Reformation and the upsurge in trials for witchcraft that occurred at roughly the same time is complex.
Increasing persecution for witchcraft actually began before the Reformation in the 1480s, but it became especially common about 1560, and the mania continued until roughly 1660.
Religious reformers’ extreme notions of the Devil’s powers and the insecurity created by the religious wars contributed to this increase.
The heightened sense of God’s power and divine wrath in the Reformation era was an important factor in the witch-hunts, but so was a change in the idea of what a witch was.
Witches were thought to engage in wild sexual orgies with the Devil, fly through the night to meetings called sabbats that parodied Christian services, and steal communion wafers and unbaptized babies to use in their rituals.
Trials involving this new notion of witchcraft as diabolical heresy began in Switzerland and southern Germany in the late fifteenth century, became less numerous in the early decades of the Reformation when Protestants and Catholics were busy fighting each other, and then picked up again in about 1560.
Though the gender balance varied widely in different parts of Europe, between 75 and 85 percent of those tried and executed were women.
Legal changes also played a role in causing, or at least allowing for, massive witch trials.
The use of inquisitorial procedure did not always lead to witch-hunts.
The most famous inquisitions in early modern Europe, those in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, were in fact very lenient in their treatment of people accused of witchcraft.
Most witch trials began with a single accusation in a village or town.
Individuals accused someone they knew of using magic to spoil food, make children ill, kill animals, raise a hailstorm, or do other types of harm.
Detailed records of witch trials survive for many parts of Europe.
After the initial suspect had been questioned, and particularly if he or she had been tortured, the people who had been implicated were brought in for questioning.
In large-scale panics a wider variety of suspects were taken in— wealthier people, children, a greater proportion of men.
Mass panics tended to end when it became clear to legal authorities, or to the community itself, that the people being questioned or executed were not what they understood witches to be, or that the scope of accusations was beyond belief.
As the seventeenth century ushered in new ideas about science and reason, many began to question whether witches could make pacts with the Devil or engage in the wild activities attributed to them.
The last official execution for witchcraft in England was in 1682, though the last one in the Holy Roman Empire was not until 1775.