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The Oxford History of the Reformation Peter Marshall
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6DP, United Kingdom
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The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
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First Edition published in 2023
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Contents
Chronology
Illustrations
1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.
Luther and the Reformation
A European Event
Ideal and Actual Reformations
One Reformation or Many? In the Beginning Was Luther
2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6.
European Christendom c.1500
Construction of a Continent
Structures
Nations and Powers in Europe
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
Shared Spiritual and Clerical Cultures
Cultural Awakenings
3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4.
The Early Reformation in the Empire, 1517–30
Thirteen Turbulent Years
Martin Luther: A Portrait
The Drop-Out: A Young Augustinian Monk
The Exegete of Wittenberg
3.5. 3.6. 3.7. 3.8.
3.9.
4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8.
Luther’s Break with the Pope
The Imperial Diet of Worms, Rebellion, and Upheaval
Zwingli and the Urban Reformation in Zurich
Intra-Reformation Disputes
Political Decisions of Church and State
Post-Reformation Europe, 1530–1600
Language, Education, Law: Religious Culture Reformed
Early Reformation Movements outside the Empire
John Calvin and the Reformed International
The Royal Reformations in Scandinavia and England
The Pacified, Restive Empire
The Transformation of Roman Catholicism
Dissenters and Nonconformists
Latin Europe after the Reformation
5. 5.1. 5.2.
The Modern Reception of the Reformation
Reformation Jubilees: 1617 to 2017
Interpretation and Debate
6. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3.
The Reformation and the Present: An Appraisal
Time Accelerated: A Change or an Apocalypse?
Impact on the Modern West
Global Protestantism
Endnotes
FurtherReading
Index
Chronology
1356
Golden Bull of Charles IV; Charles elected emperor by the college of seven Electors
1384 Death of John Wycliffe, professor of theology, Oxford 1397–1523
c.1400–68
1414–18
1415/16
1417–31
1419
Kalmar Union of northern European kingdoms
Johannes Gutenberg; invents the printing press with movable type c.1450; prints the forty-two-line Vulgate Bible c.1455
Council of Constance; end of the Western Schism (begun in 1378); high point of conciliarism; legal requirement to convene councils regularly
Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague burnt at the stake in Constance
Pope Martin V
University of Leipzig founded 1431–42
Council of Basel–Ferrara–Florence; union with Eastern churches; seven sacraments pronounced dogma (1439)
1452–93
Emperor Frederick III
6 April–29 May 1453 Siege and conquest of Constantinople; Istanbul becomes capital of the Ottoman Empire
1455–1522
1456
1458–64
Johann Reuchlin
An army of Christian Crusaders led by John of Capistrano defends Belgrade against the Ottomans
Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini)
1461 Last Christian outpost, Trabzon on the Black Sea, falls to the Ottomans
1466/9–1536
1482–1531
10 November 1483
1484–1531
1485
Erasmus of Rotterdam
Johannes Oecolampadius
Martin Luther born in Eisleben, Thuringia
Huldrych Zwingli
Saxony divided between two branches of the House of Wettin, Duke Albert and Duke-Elector Ernest 1486–1541
1486–1525
1488–1523
1489(?)–1525
Andreas Bodenstein of Karlstadt
Elector Frederick III ‘the Wise’ of Saxony
Ulrich von Hutten
Thomas Müntzer
1491–1551
Martin Bucer
1492 Granada, the last bastion of Muslim Andalusia, falls to the Catholic Monarchs; climax of the Reconquista; Columbus ‘discovers’ America
1515 Indulgence bull to finance the building of St Peter’s in Rome
1515–47
1516
King Francis I of France
Novum Instrumentum omne, first published Greek New Testament, edited by Erasmus of Rotterdam, printed in Basel by Johannes Froben
1516/17
26 April 1517
31 October 1517
Ottoman conquest of Egypt and Syria, destruction of the Mamluk sultanate
Karlstadt’s 151Theses
Dissemination of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses begins 1518–67
26 April 1518
October 1518
Landgrave Philip ‘the Magnanimous’ of Hesse
Heidelberg Disputation
Luther questioned by Cajetan in Augsburg; first collected works of Luther printed in Basel by Froben; international reception of Wittenberg theology begins 1519–56
1 January 1519
27 June–16 July 1519
summer/autumn 1520
1520–66
15 June 1520
10 December 1520
3 January 1521
16–26 April 1521
1521
May 1521–March 1522
25 May 1521
1521
24 January 1522
March 1522
1522
1522
Emperor Charles V
Zwingli begins preaching in Zurich
Leipzig Disputation: Luther and Karlstadt vs Johann Eck
High point of Luther’s publication of Reformation polemics (On Good Works; The Freedom of a Christian; To the Christian Nobility; The Babylonian Captivity)
Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I ‘the Magnificent’
Promulgation of the bull Exsurge Domine threatening Luther with excommunication
Luther burns Exsurge Domine, canon law, and several scholastic textbooks outside the Elster Gate of Wittenberg
Luther excommunicated by the bull Decet romanum pontificem
Luther attends the imperial diet in Worms
Ottomans conquer Belgrade
Luther held at the Wartburg by Elector Frederick of Saxony; intense literary productivity (On Monastic Vows; Postil; German translation of the New Testament)
Edict of Worms
Melanchthon’s Commonplaces, first Reformation dogma
Ordinances of the Wittenberg city council, chief result of the ‘Wittenberg movement’
Luther returns from the Wartburg; Invocavit sermons
Fast-breaking in Zurich
Knights Hospitaller surrender on Rhodes; Ottoman control of Venetian and Genoese trade
1522–3
1522–3
1522/4
From 1523
1523–34
1523–60
1 July 1523
1523/4
1524–5
1525–32
24 February 1525
1525
1525
15 May 1525
August 1526
29/30 August 1526
1526/9
May 1527
1527
Pope Adrian VI (Adriaan Boeyens of Utrecht)
Knights’ Revolt
Imperial diet of Nuremberg
Beginning of reform in Zurich; 1st and 2nd Zurich Disputations
Pope Clement VII
King Gustav I Eriksson Vasa of Sweden
First Reformation martyrs executed in Brussels
Luther definitively breaks with Müntzer and Karlstadt; September 1524: Karlstadt banished from the Electorate of Saxony; contacts between Saxon and Swiss dissenters; autumn 1524: Intra-Reformation controversy over the Eucharist begins
Peasants’ War; controversy between Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam on free will (De servo arbitrio)
Elector John of Saxony
Battle of Pavia; Francis I taken prisoner by Charles V
Lands of the Teutonic Order secularized as Duchy of Prussia
First adult baptisms in Zurich; expulsion of Anabaptists from the city and surrounding region; Zwingli’s Commentarius de vera et falsa religione
Battle of Frankenhausen; Thomas Müntzer captured; executed 27 May 1525
First imperial diet of Speyer
Battle of Mohács; Ottoman victory over an army led by King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia; vassal regime in Hungary under John Zápolya
Visitations begin in Saxony; evangelical church organization in Saxony and Hesse
Sack of Rome
Church property transferred to the Swedish crown; introduction of the Reformation in Sweden begins
3 November 1527 Ferdinand of Austria crowned king of Hungary
1528
Luther’s last treatise and confession in the Eucharistic Controversy; instruction of the visitors; formation of evangelical confessions begins
1529
29 June 1529
Second imperial diet of Speyer; 19 April: protest by the evangelical estates (‘Protestants’)
Peace agreement between Charles V and Clement VII in Bologna
3 August 1529 Treaty of Cambrai
September/October 1529
October 1529
24 February 1530
1530
1531
Ottoman siege of Vienna defeated
Marburg Colloquy on the Eucharist; only personal meeting of Luther and Zwingli; Marburg Articles
Charles V crowned emperor in Bologna
Augsburg imperial diet; evangelical confessions promulgated (Confessio Augustana; Confessio Tetrapolitana; Fideiratio); Schmalkaldic League founded
Second War of Kappel; Zwingli dies in battle; Oecolampadius dies of plague
1531 Ottoman conquest of Tunis; 5 January: Ferdinand of Austria elected king of Rome
1532–47
1532
1533
1534
1534–5
1534–49
Elector John Frederick of Saxony
Religious peace of Nuremberg; Protestant estates of the empire promise aid against the Turks
Peace treaty between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire; Hungary divided between John Zápolya and Ferdinand I
Philip of Hesse conquers the Duchy of Württemberg; 29 June: Treaty of Kaaden
Anabaptist Kingdom in Münster
Pope Paul III
1534 Act of Supremacy of Henry VIII separates Church of England from Rome
1535 Charles V conquers Tunis
1535/6
1536
1536–59
First trade agreement between the Ottoman Empire and France
Council summoned to Mantua; Luther writes Schmalkaldic Articles
King Christian III of Denmark and Norway; definitive adoption of the Reformation in the kingdom
1536
Wittenberg Concord: agreement on the Eucharist between Wittenberg and the southern Germans
1538 Duchies of Cleves and Guelders unite
1538–41
Calvin in Strasbourg
1539 Treaty of Frankfurt
1539/40
Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) founds the Society of Jesus 1540 Bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse
1540–1
1541
1541–53
Religious colloquies at Hagenau, Worms, and Regensburg; Confessio Augustana variata
Death of John Zápolya; Ottoman conquest of Buda and Pest; annexation of central Hungary
Duke Maurice of Saxony (Elector from 1547)
1542 Campaign of the Schmalkaldic League against Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
1543 War of the Guelderian Succession
1543–6
1544
1545–63
18 February 1546
1547
1547
1547–59
1547–53
Reformation attempt in Cologne by Archbishop-Elector Hermann of Wied
Treaty of Crépy between Emperor Charles V and King Francis I; end of the Franco-Ottoman alliance
Council of Trent; 1st–8th Sessions: 1545/6–7; 9th–14th Sessions: 1551–2; 15th–25th Sessions: 1562–3
Death of Martin Luther
Charles V wins the Schmalkaldic War (1546–7) after the Battle of Mühlberg on 24 April 1547; John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse captured
Truce of Adrianople obligates Ferdinand I to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire
King Henry II of France
King Edward VI of England; systematic church reforms begin
Two-sided handbill Crucifixion of 1528/9, with a text by Ludwig Hätzer and a woodcut by Hans Weyditz, printed in Strasbourg by Johannes Prüss the Younger, bpk/Kupferstichkabinett, SMB/Volker-H
Title page of the 1525 book Iohannis VViclefi Viri Undiquaque piissimi
The scene is Wittenberg, ‘on the edge of civilization’.1 Beginning in this little German university town of no historic significance, the Protestant Reformation very quickly became an event of European import. That was attributable in part to the political structures and constellations of the time: Charles V, the young emperor from the Habsburg dynasty which had controlled the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation since 1520/1, ruled a polymorphic, transnational system of dominions. In addition to extensive European possessions in the Netherlands, Austria, Lorraine, and the Iberian and Apennine peninsulas, the empire also included vast territories outside Europe on the newly discovered American continent. From the early 1520s on, the conflicts which Charles V fought in and outside of Europe, in particular those with France and the Ottoman Empire, had directly affected his political scope of action within the empire and in relation to the political forces which supported Luther and the Reformation.
Rapid communications within the world of European states and the global structures of the Latin church shaped the prevailing cultural, legal, mental, and religious circumstances in Europe. They also ensured that the crisis of the church’s traditional doctrines and ways of life, unleashed in Germany by the Thuringian Augustinian monk Martin Luther, had far-reaching consequences. The shared
experience of a threat to Europeans from the mysterious and universally dreaded Turkish superpower, with its foreign religion, was another substantial factor which ensured that the religious changes precipitated by the Reformation immediately took on European and, indeed, global proportions.
The European scale of the Reformation became apparent early on, as a few loosely connected facts may illustrate by way of introduction: in early 1519, the printer Johannes Froben of Basel was pleased with the distribution of his first Complete Works of Luther in France, Italy, Spain, and England, and reported that no book of his had ever sold so well.2 Immediately after the publication of Luther’s most radical treatise on the sacraments, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (De captivitate babylonica) in 1520, the English king Henry VIII wrote a rebuttal against the German theologian, and was rewarded by the pope with a Golden Rose and the title Defensor Fidei, ‘Defender of the Faith’. In May 1521, a tribunal was held near St Paul’s Cathedral in London on Luther and his followers. Also in the spring of 1521, after condemnations had been pronounced by the universities of Cologne and Leuven, the most prestigious university in the Occident, the Sorbonne in Paris, likewise condemned Luther’s doctrine as heretical. In the summer of 1521, the Reformation preacher and agitator Thomas Müntzer, driven out of Zwickau, travelled to Prague to meet with representatives of the Hussite movement. The Danish king Christian II, driven from the throne by the Danish nobility in 1523, spent a part of his exile in Wittenberg. During this time, Lucas Cranach the Elder drew a portrait of him which was included in the Danish translation of the New Testament published a short time later. Francis Lambert of Avignon, William Tyndale, and Hans Tausen, later protagonists of Reformation developments in France, England, and Denmark, all studied in Wittenberg in the early 1520s. In a letter written in 1525, the Jewish scholar Eliezer Ha Levi in Jerusalem saw the apocalyptic expectation of a collapse of Christianity and the beginning of Israel’s redemption ‘confirmed by the appearance of Martin Luther’.3 In 1532, the Turkish sultan
Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), asked an envoy from the Holy Roman Empire how old Luther was. The sultan was sad to hear that the Reformer was already forty-nine, but instructed the envoy to tell him he would find him ‘a gracious lord’. From the early 1520s, Luther’s and other Reformers’ ideas were discussed in the circle of Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, and the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples.
The 1534 ‘Affair of the Placards’, in which Protestant handbills in France penetrated as far as the apartments of King Francis I, marked the turning point to the French king’s staunchly antiReformation policy.
The European or pan-Christian scale of the turn or new departure that began with Luther’s Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, also known as the Ninety-Five Theses, is also made plain in the history of the Reformation by the superintendent of Gotha, Friedrich Myconius.
According to Myconius, the Ninety-FiveThesestraversed Germany in fourteen days, ‘all Christendom in four weeks, as if the angels themselves had been couriers [cf. Psalm 103:20] and brought them before all people’s eyes.’4 Myconius was also well aware of the European dimensions of the Reformation in regard to the universities that debated Luther’s case, the places where his writings were burnt, the connections between the individual protagonists in England, France, Hungary, and Scotland, and the challenges of the Ottoman Empire. The Scot John Knox, the Swiss Heinrich Bullinger, and the Frenchman Theodor Beza took similar views in their narratives of the Reformation.
It is evident from these snapshots that the Reformation was an international event from its very inception. The assertion that it was not until John Calvin (1509–64), whose earliest Reformation writing dates perhaps from November 1533,5 that ‘the internationalism of the Reformation’ was established ‘through its integration of French and other European traditions’6 is inaccurate and misleading. The cultural revolution that had resulted from the invention of printing with movable type in the late fifteenth century also played a critical
part in the rapid growth of the Wittenberg movement to European proportions and political importance. And, not least, the European scope of the Roman Catholic church, generally communicating in Latin across territorial and linguistic boundaries, was also propitious to the formation of an international uprising against it. A history of the Reformation that remains bound up in national histories cannot escape the shadow of the nineteenth century, nor do justice to the specifically European character of the Reformation.
1.2. Ideal and Actual Reformations
The concept of the Reformation itself is fuzzy and variable, so that a preliminary definition is helpful. In the currently usual, widespread usage, it denotes a certain historical phenomenon and a specific historical epoch in Latin European history: namely the changes in the church and society that began with Luther’s critique of indulgence in the autumn of 1517, leading to the creation of Protestant congregations and churches independent of Rome at the municipal, regional, or national level, and to the fragmentation of the Roman Catholic church into different denominations. The fact that the term ‘Reformation’ is used to sum up this complex process and the whole era in which it took place is essentially a result of Protestantdominated, nineteenth-century German historiography, as authoritatively presented for over a century in Leopold von Ranke’s HistoryoftheReformationinGermany(1839–47).
The use of the word ‘reformation’ to denote changes in church and society is older, however. As early as the fifteenth century, the call for a thoroughgoing reform had caused turmoil and strain in the Latin church. The ‘reformation’ (causa reformationis) had been one of the major themes of the Council of Constance (1414–18): to ensure the continuing ‘cultivation of the Lord’s field’ and uproot the ‘briars, thorns and thistles of heresy, error and schism’, to ‘correct excesses’ and to ‘reform what is deformed’,7 this general synod of
Latin Christendom had ordered the regular observance of church councils at fixed intervals. The first was to be held within five years, the second seven years later, and subsequent general councils every ten years.
The Council of Constance defined itself as the highest authority in all matters concerning the faith, the unity of the church, and its ‘reformation in head and members’,8 including the papacy.
Thus ‘reformation’ was considered to be a fundamental task of the church which concerned all Christians, which could never be finished, but must always begin anew. Claims to the contrary9 notwithstanding, the principle that the church must be continually reformed (ecclesia semper reformanda) is not an invention of the Reformation.
After the end of the Council of Constance, successive consolidations of the papacy restored it to its former power and advanced it further, so that conciliarism and its concept of constant reform gradually lost ground. In the decades before and after 1500, scepticism about the chances of a general reform grew. Geiler von Kaysersberg, one of the most influential preachers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, saw deep deficits in all the estates of contemporary Christianity—the lay, the clerical and the monastic. He described the clerical estate, that is, secular priests, as ‘lazy and useless’ (‘fullundsolnüt’), marked by ‘pride, haughtiness’ (‘hoffart, übermut’); its members, he wrote, ‘heap one benefice on another’ and live in ‘unchastity’, ‘wallowing in dirt and filth’. The monastic orders are ‘ragged’, ‘at the forefront of all vice’, and so caught up in ‘pride’, ‘greed’, and ‘unchastity’ that they ‘can no longer be helped’. Likewise the secular, political estate, Geiler wrote, was deeply ‘depraved’, the princes incessantly fighting and disputing —‘how would one go about reforming them?’ asked the preacher of Strasbourg Cathedral.10
The Council of Basel (1431–37/49), Geiler continued, had debated for six years as to how ‘a complete reformation of Christendom could be accomplished, and yet nothing came of it’.11 Since a general and comprehensive reformation seemed unfeasible,
the only course that remained, according to Geiler, was that of many small reforms under the specific responsibility of the separate estates.12 ‘A bishop in his bishopric; an abbot in his cloister; a councillor in his city; a burgher in his house: that would be easy. But a general reformation of all Christendom, that is hard and heavy, and no council has been able to consider it and find a way.’13 In his view, everyone from the given authorities in the three estates— church, monastery, and world—on down to the ‘house father’ should push for a remedy, that is, a reform, of the existing deficiencies within their jurisdiction. Geiler’s reform concept is based on a model of piety that was characteristic of his time: God would reward the efforts exerted and would recognize even imperfect reforms as proof of good will.
In theological terms, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther’s conception of a reformation was different. During his struggle against indulgence that began in autumn of 1517, he found that ‘The church needs a reformation which is not the work of man, namely the pope, or of many men, namely the cardinals, both of which the most recent council [the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512–17] has demonstrated, but it is the work of the whole world, indeed it is the work of God alone. However, only God who has created time knows the time for this reformation.’14 In view of the fundamental ills that Luther perceived in the church and the society of his time, human agents seemed to be doomed to failure. Only God Himself could reform His church.
To Luther, it was self-evident that God would use for that purpose the heads and hands of precisely those authorities in all the estates which Geiler had mentioned. In the summer of 1520 in any case, in his great reformatory manifesto To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation), he sought to mobilize precisely these forces for his reformation.
Over the rest of the sixteenth century, it became customary among his followers and fellow reformers to call the changes brought about in church and society as a ‘Reformation’. Towards the end of that century, the custom arose among those who looked back
on the beginnings of the Reformation to use the same word for the period in which the changes took place that they considered improvements in the church. By about 1600, it had become usual to call Luther a reformer, and the turning point in salvation history which he had brought about—which was seen as a revelation of the Gospel and a liberation from the yoke of an Antichristian papacy—a Reformation.15
As a part of salvation history, this ‘Reformation’, the liberation from ‘Roman tyranny’, was often compared with the biblical flight of the children of Israel from their Egyptian captivity. The Lutherans’ perception of the impending ‘end of times’, fed by the prophetic sources of holy scripture and extra-biblical testimonies, was still quite vital around 1600—much more so than in the competing denominations, Roman Catholicism and the Reformed churches. God spoke to humanity by special signs, such as apparitions in the heavens; most of these were interpreted by Lutheran theologians as admonitions to repent. In reflections on the previous century that were offered in sermons at the beginning of the year 1600, the Lutherans’ historic memory condensed into a compact historic image of the Reformation as an epoch of the eschatological salvation of Christianity from the pope as Antichrist. The reference to this Reformation also served to reassure the Lutherans that they were on the right side in the struggle to ascertain the true Christianity—a struggle which was fought in earnest, and indeed could erupt in military conflict at any time. Luther’s Reformation, in which a little David had prevailed against the pope as an overpowering Goliath, seemed to prove that God had chosen it and protected it, as did the continued existence of the ‘evangelical’ church that invoked Luther’s name. This conception of history, interwoven with eschatological elements and defiant triumphalism, shaped the Lutherans’ mood and mentality and the conditions under which this Reformation entered the cultural memory, especially in Germany.
1.3. One Reformation or Many? In the Beginning Was Luther
For some time there has been a rather tacit disagreement in international research on the Reformation in regard to nothing less than the very heart of the matter: that is, a disagreement as to what we mean by ‘Reformation’. Do we mean all those developments and fundamental changes that occurred between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries on the Western European continent which favoured the rise of a ‘Western modern age’—the geographic developments, for example; the disciplined, efficient, and controlled statecraft, with a religious regimen to match; humanism, critical philology, literacy, and the creation and development of the educational system; the media revolution; and other developments? From this point of view, it does not make sense to make the religious and social forces originating with Luther and Wittenberg into the pivotal element of the historical developments. On the contrary: a great number of diverse developments over a long segment of time —between about 1450 and 1650—must be taken into consideration, and the ‘reforming’ impulses, which then means, essentially, the modernizing forces leading to our civilization, must be analysed with a broad focus. If we understand ‘Reformation’ in this general sense as a historical force,16 then it is only logical and compelling to pluralize ‘reformations’ to mean all those developments that led to the ‘early modern’ and then the ‘modern era’. A similar point can be made in regard to the spectrum of religious traditions and positions: naturally the developments in the Catholic church, in the Protestant ‘sects’, especially among the Anabaptists, and in ‘Protestantism’, which is so diverse in itself that it too could easily be pluralized,17 all led in their respective ways to the very diverse and contradictory ‘modern age’. As with other historic phenomena, such as the Enlightenment, the tendency towards the plural ‘Reformations’ is prevalent today. It brings with it the drawback of blurring the contours of the formerly distinct, unambiguous historical term of ‘the Reformation’.
The present portrayal takes a different approach: instead of subsuming under the term ‘Reformation’ all the upheavals and new departures, all the changes occurring between the fifteenth century and the seventeenth century that led out of the ‘Middle Ages’, this account uses ‘the Reformation’ to refer to a certain historic complex of events that was condensed under the historical concept of ‘Reformation’ as early as the end of the sixteenth century, and widely commemorated, especially in the tradition of ‘Reformation jubilees’. This coherent historical narrative of ‘theReformation’ had a definite beginning: namely Luther and his conflict with the papal church. It was undisputed among all the principal sixteenth-century actors, including Luther’s opponents, that Luther’s conflict with the Roman church, the announcement of his excommunication on 15 June 1520, and the ensuing aggravations, controversies, and condemnations were what set in motion the unique events which led to the rise of local, territorial, and national churches independent of Rome—in other words, were what caused the ‘Reformation’ as the sum total of these small-scale processes of change.
Placing Luther at the beginning must not imply inflating him to a monumental scale. He stands at this beginning, not primarily because of his many special characteristics, but because of a singular convergence of historical factors which made it possible for a disputation on indulgence—which never took place—to grow into a radical, revolutionary change in the institution of the church. But placing Luther at the beginning also means situating him in his time, including the mentalities, the social and political orders, the modes of religious and economic activity, the university, the religious community of his familiars, as well as the fears and awakenings of the period around 1500. In the account that follows, special emphasis is placed on the role played by the reformers’ use of the printed word as a polemical medium. Luther wrote as if his life depended on it; indeed he saved his life through his publications, through his writing.
The growth of publishing in the years from 1518 to 1521 was simultaneous with the rise of a reformation movement that rapidly
gained visibility beyond the borders of the empire and became a European phenomenon. None of the reform movements or processes of change in the individual European countries—in Switzerland; in France, the Netherlands, and England; in Denmark and Sweden; in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia—arose independently of Luther and the events in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. Accordingly, none of the European Reformation can be explained primarily by late medieval forces of reform, although it is without a doubt accurate to say that many traditions of the late Middle Ages lived on—and still older predispositions regained vitality—in, with, and under the Reformation. But all the will to reform that had built up, and the looming will of kings and princes to seize the institution of the church, the resentment against the curia that had accumulated over Roman fiscal policy—all of this only condensed into a historical change after the mendicant monk from Wittenberg, ‘on fire with zeal for Christ, as I thought, or with the heat of youth, if you prefer’18 was driven out of his corner19 and entered the historical stage. The universal importance of the pope, whose indulgences were at issue, contributed to the rapid escalation of the conflict over the Saxon monk. Not until the rumbling had spread in the empire, Luther’s texts and those of his early allies had been distributed abroad, and the humanists’ European communication network had begun to buzz did those events begin that ended in the many Reformations and hence the one Reformation that marked an epoch in the history of Latin European Christendom.
Of course, seeing Luther as the beginning of the ‘Reformation’ does not mean discounting the originality or diminishing the importance of all the other actors, including the other reformers who arose alongside him or in opposition to him. By the time Zwingli, for example, heard of Luther, he was already a mature intellectual personality in many ways; he was not about to begin following Luther blindly. And yet Zwingli’s ideas and actions took on a direction, a tendency, a focus, and a momentum because of the history that had begun with Luther—more specifically, with Luther’s
controversy over indulgence—that they would not otherwise have had. And the same can be said, cum grano salis, for all the other protagonists. Of course the epoch-making phenomenon of ‘the Reformation’ depended on a multitude of factors that favoured its development or made it possible at all: the political conflicts in Europe; the legal structures of the empire, a pressure to reform that took many different forms; the fear of the Ottoman Empire; specific developments in the national churches of the various European countries; the surge in communication caused by the printing press; and so on and on. But Luther is the only person without whom the ‘story’ of the Reformation cannot be told at all.
2 European Christendom c.1500
2.1. Construction of a Continent
New Horizons
In the decades preceding the Reformation, the gravest menace to Christian Europe was the fleets and armies of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, this threat from its margins was the inducement to construe the continent as a unit. The dramatic rise of the most powerful empire of the time took place during the hundred years from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. That hundred years begins in 1351, the date of the Turks’ first military alliance with one Christian state, namely Genoa, against another Christian state, Venice, followed by the establishment of the first Ottoman base in Europe, at Gallipoli on the Dardanelles, in 1354. The end of the period is marked by the siege and conquest of Constantinople from 6 April to 29 May 1453.
The dominance of the Ottomans in the Balkan peninsula—their victory over the Serbs in 1371, the subjection of the Bulgarian tsars in 1388, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389—seemed briefly to be threatened in the early fifteenth century by Timur Lang (or Tamerlane), the restorer of the Mongol Empire, but then continued and expanded throughout the Mediterranean region, with the
invasion of Thessalonica and West Anatolia in 1430, the victory over an army of Crusaders at Varna in 1444, suzerainty over the Peloponnese in 1460, and the conquest of Syria and Egypt and the fall of the Mamluk sultanate in 1516/17. In Europe, the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire created a novel experience of menace that sometimes took on an apocalyptic character.
In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, Pope Pius II exhorted his contemporaries to look to the last remaining home of Christianity after the complete Muslim conquest of the formerly Christian continents of Africa and Asia, proclaiming ‘Europe the homeland’ of the Christians (Europa id estpatria, domuspropria).1 Europe was called upon to fight, both in intellectual and in military terms. The head of the Latin church sought to create this Europe of solidarity against the external enemy of the Christian faith by acting as if it was already a reality. Pius urged Christendom to undertake an armed pilgrimage, a crusade—an unsuccessful one, in the event— that would stand up to the recalcitrant enemy under the crescent moon. After years of strenuous negotiations to mobilize for the war against the Turks, the exhausted pope ended his last voyage on 15 August 1464: Pius II died within sight of the Venetian fleet which had just sailed into the port of Ancona, and which was supposed to form the core of the campaign against the Ottomans. His successor Paul II then negotiated again, especially with the Italian potentates who were not eager to pay, who were notoriously mistrustful of, if not hostile to, one another and the pope, and sometimes went as far as to threaten to ally with Turkey. In spite of all papal exhortations, Europe was not united in the willingness and ability to confront an Islamic threat, nor did it become united in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
