Reformation

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 31st of October 1517, Martin Luther addressed a letter to Albert of Brandenburg, accusing the clerics who preached indulgences of deceiving the faithful. Attached to it was a disputation paper on indulgences and papal power. It is usually called the Ninety-five Theses, and tradition holds Luther nailed a copy to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Pope Leo X, when the case reached him, dismissed it as a quarrel among friars.

  That quarrel became the Reformation, a theological movement in 16th-century Western Christianity. It challenged the papacy and the authority of the Catholic Church hierarchy, and it marked the beginning of Protestantism. Scholars count it among the events that ended the Middle Ages and opened the early modern period in Europe.

  How did a dispute about certificates of pardon split a religion that had displayed remarkable unity? Why did one professor survive when earlier critics were burned at the stake? And how did a movement begun in Saxony fracture into rival camps that turned on each other? The answers run through printing presses, peasant armies, Swiss sausages, and a council that met across three decades.

• 2. A World Of Calamities

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  From the early 14th century, Europe endured a period of dreadful calamities. The worst was the Black Death, a pandemic that killed about one-third of the population. Around 1500, Europe held roughly 60 to 85 million people, no more than 75 percent of the mid-14th-century maximum. A shortage of workers pushed landlords to restrict their tenants' rights, sparking rural revolts that often ended in compromise.

  Death haunted the imagination. The allegory of the danse macabre, the dance of death, became a popular artistic motif. Fear of sudden death fed the popularity of Masses for the dead, ceremonies that pointed to a widespread belief in purgatory. Purgatory was understood as a transitory state for souls needing purification before they could enter heaven. Fear of malevolent magic was also growing, and witch hunts intensified.

  At the end of the 15th century, syphilis spread through Europe for the first time, destroying its victims with ulcers and scabs before killing them. Alongside the French invasion of Italy, the disease helped the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who called for moral renewal in Florence. He was arrested and executed for heresy in 1498, yet his meditations remained popular reading long after his death.

• 3. Authority And Its Cracks

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  Catholic religious authority rested on several pillars: the Bible and its commentaries, apostolic tradition, the decisions of ecumenical councils, scholastic theology, and the pope. Catholics regarded the Vulgate, completed by Jerome, as the Bible's authentic Latin translation. The crucial elements of mainstream belief had first been summarised in the Nicene Creed in 325, including the dogma of the Trinity, one God uniting three equal persons.

  The popes claimed the power of binding and loosing that Christ had reportedly granted to Peter the Apostle. From this came indulgences, reductions of the penalty for sin in this world and in purgatory, granted to contrite sinners who gave alms or went on pilgrimage. But the papacy had passed through turmoil. From 1309 to 1417 election controversies produced the Western Schism, which at its height left three rival claimants to the throne of Peter.

  The Renaissance popes were secular rulers too, princes of the Papal States caught in Italy's power struggles. Pope Alexander VI handed high offices to his relatives, including his illegitimate sons. Julius II took up arms to recover lost papal territory, prompting an underground satire titled Julius Excluded from Heaven. Julius also ordered the demolition of the ruined 4th-century St. Peter's Basilica to build a new one, a decision that created a financial problem with consequences no one yet foresaw.

• 4. Forerunners And The Printed Word

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  The Waldensians outlasted their founder Peter Waldo, who died around 1205, surviving a series of anti-heretic crusades through efficient organisation. They rejected the clergy's monopoly on public ministry and let all trained members, men and women alike, preach. The Oxford theologian John Wycliffe attacked pilgrimages, the veneration of saints, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. His followers, the Lollards, rejected images, clerical celibacy, and the purchase of indulgences, and their communities survived the purges.

  Jan Hus, a Prague academic, carried Wycliffe's influence into Bohemia with popular sermons against clerical wealth. Summoned to the Council of Constance under a safe conduct granted by the German king Sigismund of Luxemburg, he was sentenced to death and burned at the stake on the 6th of July 1415. His execution ignited a nationwide movement. The moderate Hussites, called Utraquists, taught that the Eucharist should be given to the laity in both kinds. Historians customarily call Wycliffe and Hus forerunners of the Reformation.

  The printing machine with movable type changed everything. The German inventor Johannes Gutenberg first published a two-volume printed Vulgate in the early 1450s. Bible translations into High and Low German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, and Catalan appeared between 1466 and 1492. The humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine, a basic document of papal authority, was a medieval forgery. By the time the Dutch humanist Erasmus completed his Latin-Greek editions of the New Testament, textual criticism was challenging the scriptural proofs behind Catholic dogma.

• 5. The Coin In The Box

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  Pope Leo X resolved to finish the new St. Peter's Basilica, begun in 1506 under Julius II. To fund it he announced a new plenary indulgence in the bull Sacrosanctis in 1515. On the advice of the banker Jakob Fugger, he appointed the pluralist prelate Albert of Brandenburg to run the sales campaign in Germany. The Dominican friar Johann Tetzel, commissioner of indulgences in Magdeburg and Halberstadt since January 1517, used unusually aggressive methods. A slogan attributed to him claimed that as soon as the coin into the box rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.

  The campaign's vulgarity shocked serious believers, among them a theology professor at the University of Wittenberg. Luther had entered an Augustinian monastery after a thunderstorm reminded him of sudden death and eternal damnation, yet his anxiety about his sinfulness never eased. Studying Augustine of Hippo, he came to believe that those whom God chose as his elect received faith as a gift, independent of their acts. The Reformers would argue that justification rested on faith in Jesus Christ alone.

  Luther presented his theology of the Cross at Heidelberg on the 26th of April 1518, describing a loving God who became frail to save fallen humanity. Pope Leo, urged on by Luther's opponents, sent Cardinal Thomas Cajetan to persuade him to withdraw. Their meeting at Augsburg in October 1518 was, in one historian's words, the point at which the opposition between Reformation and Catholicism first emerged. Cajetan feared that believers who accepted Luther's view of justification would no longer obey clerical guidance.

• 6. Here I Stand

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  On the 15th of June 1520, the papal bull Exsurge Domine condemned forty-one of Luther's theses and gave him sixty days to recant. His theology was racing ahead. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he reduced the sacraments to baptism and the Eucharist and called priests servants of the community, which is why they came to be called ministers. His manifesto To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation tied the papacy to the Antichrist. In response to a papal order to burn his books, Luther and his followers burned the bull along with the Corpus Juris Canonici at Wittenberg.

  The bull excommunicating Luther appeared on the 3rd of January 1521. The newly elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V wanted to outlaw him at the Diet of Worms but could not decide alone, since authority rested with the Imperial Diets. Frederick the Wise vetoed the imperial ban, and Luther was summoned to defend himself in April 1521. He refused to recant, saying that only arguments from the Bible could convince him his works contained errors. After he left, those who remained sanctioned the ban.

  To save his life, Frederick arranged Luther's abduction on the 4th of May. During a ten-month staged captivity at Wartburg castle, Luther translated the New Testament into High German. The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch calls it an extraordinary achievement that has shaped the German language ever since. The translation was published at the 1522 Leipzig Book Fair alongside Luther's treatise On Monastic Vows, which laid the foundations for dissolving the monasteries.

• 7. Splinters In The Movement

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  Andreas Karlstadt pushed reform forward during Luther's absence. On Christmas Day 1521 he administered the Eucharist in common garment, and the next day announced his engagement to a fifteen-year-old noble girl, Anna von Mochau. He called images devilish deceit, and religious art was destroyed in bulk. The Zwickau prophets, incited by the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer, claimed direct revelations from God and attacked infant baptism. Frederick the Wise released Luther in March 1522 to end the anarchy, and Luther had the prophets driven out as fanatics.

  The Swiss priest Huldrych Zwingli claimed he began preaching the Gospel in 1516, long before anyone in his region had heard of Luther. He rose to prominence after a meal of sausages in Zürich during Lent 1522 broke the rules of fasting. With the magistrates' backing, images were removed from churches in 1524, and a German communion service later replaced the Latin Mass on a plain wooden table. Zwingli denied Christ's presence in the bread and wine, treating the Eucharist as a commemoration of the crucified Jesus. The disagreement set off a bitter pamphlet war with Luther.

  Zwingli's caution outraged more radical reformers. In January 1525, the former priest George Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to rebaptize him, and the two then rebaptized fifteen others. For this they were called Anabaptists. Rebaptism had been a capital offence since Late Roman times, and the Anabaptist Felix Manz was condemned and drowned in the Limmat River, the first victim of religious persecution by reformist authorities. At Schleitheim in February 1527, the pacifist Michael Sattler chaired an assembly that adopted articles prohibiting oath-taking, bearing arms, and holding civic office. Sattler was soon captured and executed.

• 8. Kingdoms Choose Sides

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  Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, became the first prince to formally abandon Catholicism, transforming his territory into the hereditary Duchy of Prussia in April 1525. At the Diet of Speyer in 1526, the German princes effectively sanctioned the principle cuius regio, eius religio, whose realm, their religion. When Ferdinand I reinforced the imperial ban at Speyer in 1529, five imperial princes and fourteen imperial cities presented a formal protestatio. They were mocked as Protestants, and the name spread to all followers of the new theologies.

  Measured against the splits that followed, even allies could not agree. Philip the Magnanimous organised a colloquy at Marburg in October 1529 between Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Oecolampadius, but they could not settle on a common formula for the Eucharist. Luther remarked that our spirit has nothing in common with your spirit. At Augsburg in 1530, Melanchthon presented the twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession on the 25th of June. The Protestant Imperial Estates then formed the Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance signed by five princes and fourteen cities on the 27th of February 1531.

  In England, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey failed to secure the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had not produced a male heir. Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell argued the marriage could be annulled without the pope. Henry, in love with Anne Boleyn, married her, and she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Acts of Parliament severed the English Church from the papacy. The Act of Appeals of April 1533 declared that this realm of England is an Empire.

  The sack of Rome in 1527, when Charles V's mutinous troops took Pope Clement VII into custody, convinced many Catholics that the church needed profound reform. Pope Paul III appointed reform-minded figures as cardinals, among them Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole, and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa. They produced a report condemning the corruption and waste of church administration. Contarini, Pole, and other Spirituali were ready to make concessions to Protestants, but their liberalism shocked the conservative Caraffa.

  The Society of Jesus became the most influential of the new orders. Its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, was born to a Basque noble family and chose a military career until a siege wound ended it. During an ascetic retreat in a cave he began the Spiritual Exercises. Paul III sanctioned the Jesuits in 1540. When Loyola died, the Society had about 1,000 members; in less than a decade it numbered around 3,500. Their Roman collegium trained priests to reject Protestant theology in Germany, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary.

  Paul III convoked the nineteenth ecumenical council to handle the crisis. The Council of Trent met in sessions from December 1545 to 1548, from 1551 to 1552, and from 1562 to 1563. It reaffirmed that apostolic tradition was as authentic a source of faith as the Bible, and stressed the importance of good works in salvation, rejecting two key elements of Luther's theology. Before closing in December 1563 it ordered the papacy to revise the liturgical books and complete a new catechism. The wars of religion that grew from these divisions would see the deaths of between seven and seventeen million people.