Chapter 13 - Reformation and Religious Warfare in the Sixteenth Century

Chapter 13.1 - Prelude to Reformation

• During the second half of the fifteenth century, the new Classical learning that was part of Italian Renaissance humanism spread to northern Europe and spawned a movement called Christian or northern Renaissance humanism whose major goal was the reform of Christianity.
• No doubt the failure of the Renaissance popes to provide spiritual leadership had affected the spiritual life of all Christendom.
• The papal court’s preoccupation with finances had an especially strong impact on the clergy.
• While many of the leaders of the church were failing to meet their responsibilities, ordinary people were clamoring for meaningful religious expression and certainty of salvation.
• As a result, for some the salvation process became almost mechanical.
• As more and more people sought certainty of salvation through veneration of relics, col-lections of such objects grew.
• Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony and Martin Luther’s prince, had amassed more than 19,000 relics to which were attached indulgences that could reduce one’s time in purgatory by nearly 2 million years.
• Other people sought certainty of salvation in the popular mystical movement known as the Modern Devotion, which downplayed religious dogma and stressed the need to follow the teachings of Jesus.
• The deepening of religious life, especially in the second half of the fifteenth century, found little echo among the worldly-wise clergy, and this environment helps explain the tremendous and immediate impact of Luther’s ideas.
• At the same time, several sources of reform were already at work within the Catholic Church at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
• Especially noticeable were the calls for reform from the religious orders of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians.
• One of the popular preachers was Johannes Geiler of Kaisersberg , who denounced the corruption of the clergy.
• The Oratory of Divine Love, first organized in Italy in 1497, was not a religious order but an informal group of clergy and laymen who worked to foster reform by emphasizing personal spiritual development and outward acts of charity.
• A Spanish archbishop, Cardinal Ximenes, was especially active in using Christian humanism to reform the church.
• To foster spirituality among the people, he had a number of religious writings, including Thomas a ` Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, translated into Spanish.

Chapter 13.2 - Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany

• While at the Wartburg Castle, Luther’s foremost achievement was his translation of the New Testament into German.

• Instead, the primary means of disseminating Luther’s ideas was the sermon. In city after city, the arrival of preachers presenting Luther’s teachings was soon followed by a pub-lic debate in which the new preachers proved victorious.

  Politics in Germany

• By the end of 1529, Charles was ready to deal with Germany. Though all owed loyalty to the emperor, Germany’s medieval development had enabled these states to become quite independent of imperial authority.

• They had no desire to have a strong emperor.

• Charles’s attempt to settle the Lutheran problem at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 proved completely inadequate, and the emperor wound up demanding that the Lutherans return to the Catholic Church by April 15, 1531.

• These Protestant German states vowed to assist each other ‘‘whenever any one of us is attacked on account of the Word of God and the doctrine of the Gospel.

• The renewed threat of the Turks against Vienna forced Charles once again to seek compromise instead of war with the Protestant authorities.

• From 1532 to 1535, Charles was forced to fight off an Ottoman, Arab, and Barbary attack on the Mediterranean coasts of Italy and Spain.

• Two additional Habsburg-Valois Wars soon followed and kept Charles preoccupied with military campaigns in southern France and the Low Countries.

• Finally, Charles made peace with Francis in 1544 and the Turks in 1545.

• Fifteen years after the Diet of Augsburg, Charles was finally free to resolve his problem in Germany.

• Charles brought a sizable imperial army of German, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish troops to do battle with the Protestants.

• In the first phase of the Schmalkaldic Wars , the emperor’s forces decisively defeated the Lutherans at the Battle of Muhlberg .

• Charles V was at the zenith of his power, and the Protestant cause seemed doomed.

• This time Charles was less fortunate and had to negotiate a truce.

• Exhausted by his efforts to maintain religious orthodoxy and the unity of his empire, Charles abandoned German affairs to his brother Ferdinand, abdicated all of his titles in 1556, and retired to his country estate in Spain to spend the remaining two years of his life in solitude.

Chapter 13.3 - The Spread of the Protestant Reformation

• Ulrich Zwingli was a product of the Swiss forest cantons.

• The precocious son of a relatively prosperous peasant, the young Zwingli eventually obtained both bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees.

• During his university education at Vienna and Basel, Zwingli was strongly influenced by Christian humanism.

• Ordained a priest in 1506, he accepted a parish post in rural Switzerland until his appointment as a cathedral priest in the Great Min-ster of Zu ̈rich in 1518.

• Through his preaching there, Zwingli began the Reformation in Switzerland. Zwingli’s preaching of the Gospel caused such unrest that in 1523 the city council held a public dispute or debate in the town hall.

  John Calvin and Calvinism

• He adhered to the doctrine of justification by faith alone to explain how humans achieved salvation.

• Calvin also placed much emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God or the ‘‘power, grace, and glory of God.

• This ‘‘eternal decree,’’ as Calvin called it, meant that God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned .

• According to Calvin, ‘‘He has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction.

• In no instance did Calvin ever suggest that worldly success or material wealth was a sign of election.

• Significantly for the future of Calvinism, although Calvin himself stressed that there could be no absolute certainty of salvation, some of his followers did not always make this distinction.

• To Calvin, the church was a divine institution responsible for preaching the word of God and administering the sacra-ments.

• Calvin kept the same two sacraments as other Protestant reformers, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

• Jesus’s body is at the right hand of God and thus cannot be in the sacrament, but to the believer, Jesus is spiritually present in the Lord’s Supper.

• Before 1536, John Calvin had essentially been a scholar. But in that year, he took up a ministry in Geneva that lasted, except for a brief exile , until his death in 1564.

• Calvin achieved a major success in 1541 when the city council accepted his new church constitution, known as the Ecclesiastical Ordinances.

• During Calvin’s last years, stricter laws against blasphemy were enacted and enforced with banishment and public whippings.

• Calvin’s success in Geneva enabled the city to become a vibrant center of Protestantism. ’’ Following Calvin’s lead, missionaries trained in Ge-neva were sent to all parts of Europe.

• Calvinism became established in France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and central and eastern Europe.

• By the mid-sixteenth century, Calvinism had replaced Lutheranism as the international form of Protestantism, and Calvin’s Geneva stood as the fortress of the Reformation.

Chapter 13.4 - The Social Impact of the Protestant Reformation

• Although the Protestant reformers sanctified this role of woman as mother and wife, viewing it as a holy vocation, Protestantism also left few alternatives for women.
• At the same time, by emphasizing the father as ‘‘ruler’’ and hence the center of household religion, Protestantism even removed the woman from her traditional role as controller of religion in the home.
• Protestant reformers called on men and women to read the Bible and participate in religious services together.
• In this way, the reformers did provide a stimulus for the education of girls so that they could read the Bible and other religious literature.
• The elimination of saints put an end to the numerous celebrations of religious holy days and changed a community’s sense of time.
• Thus, in Protestant communities, religious ceremonies and imagery, such as processions and statues, tended to be replaced with individual private prayer, family worship, and collective prayer and worship at the same time each week on Sunday.
• In addition to abolishing saints’ days and religious carnivals, some Protestant reformers even tried to eliminate customary forms of entertainment.
• Dutch Calvinists denounced the tradition of giving small presents to children on the feast of Saint Nicholas, in early December.
• Many of these Protestant attacks on popular culture were unsuccessful, however.
• The importance of taverns in English social life made it impossible to eradicate them, and celebrating at Christmastime persisted in the Dutch Netherlands.

Chapter 13.5 - The Catholic Reformation

• There is no doubt that the Catholic Church underwent a revitalization in the sixteenth century.
• No doubt, both positions on the nature of the reformation of the Catholic Church contain elements of truth.
• The Catholic Reformation revived the best features of medieval Catholicism and then adjusted them to meet new conditions, as is most apparent in the revival of mysticism and monasticism.
• The emergence of a new mysticism, closely tied to the traditions of Catholic piety, was especially evident in the life of the Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Avila .
• In 1542, Pope Paul III took the decisive step of calling for a general council of Christendom to resolve the religious differences created by the Protestant revolt.
• It was not until March 1545, however, that a group of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots, and theologians met in the city of Trent on the border between Germany and Italy and initiated the Council of Trent.
• But a variety of problems, including an outbreak of plague, war between France and Spain, and the changing of popes, prevented the council from holding regular annual meetings.
• Nevertheless, the council met intermittently in three major sessions between 1545 and 1563.
• Moderate Catholic reformers hoped that the council would make compromises in formulating doctrinal definitions that would encourage Protestants to return to the church.
• Conservatives, however, favored an uncompromising restatement of Catholic doctrines in strict opposition to Protestant positions.
• The final doctrinal decrees of the Council of Trent reaffirmed traditional Catholic teachings in opposition to Protestant beliefs.
• Other decrees declared both faith and good works to be necessary for salvation and upheld the seven sacraments, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and clerical celibacy.
• The council also affirmed the belief in purgatory and in the efficacy of indulgences, although it prohibited the hawking of indulgences.
• After the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church possessed a clear body of doctrine and a unified church under the acknowledged supremacy of the popes, who had triumphed over bishops and councils.
• The Roman Catholic Church had become one Christian denomination among many with an organizational framework and doctrinal pattern that would not be significantly altered for four hundred years.
• With renewed confidence, the Catholic Church entered a new phase of its history.

Chapter 13.6 - Politics and the Wars of Religion in the Sixteenth Century

• Religion was the engine that drove the French civil wars of the sixteenth century.
• Concerned by the growth of Calvinism, the French kings tried to stop its spread by persecuting Calvinists but had little success.
• Possibly 40 to 50 percent of the French nobility became Huguenots, including the house of Bourbon , which stood next to the Valois in the royal line of succession and ruled the southern French kingdom of Navarre .
• The conversion of so many nobles made the Huguenots a potentially dangerous political threat to monarchical power.
• The Valois monarchy was staunchly Catholic, and its control of the Catholic Church gave it little incentive to look on Protestantism favorably.
• Possessing the loyalty of Paris and large sections of northern and northwestern France through their client-patronage system, the Guises could recruit and pay for large armies and received support abroad from the papacy and Jesuits who favored the family’s uncompromising Catholic position.
• But religion was not the only factor contributing to the French civil wars.
• The French Wars of Religion, then, presented a major constitutional crisis for France and temporarily halted the development of the French centralized territorial state.
• The claim of the state’s ruling dynasty to a person’s loyalties was temporarily superseded by loyalty to one’s religious belief.
• For some people, the unity of France was less important than religious truth.
• But there also emerged in France a group of public figures who placed politics before religion and believed that no religious truth was worth the ravages of civil war.
• After the death of Queen Mary in 1558, her half-sister Elizabeth ascended the throne of England.
• During Elizabeth’s reign, England rose to prominence as the relatively small island kingdom became the leader of the Protes-tant nations of Europe, laid the foundations for a world empire, and experienced a cultural renaissance.
• During Mary’s reign, she had even been imprisoned for a while and had learned early to hide her true feelings from both private and public sight. Intelligent, cautious, and self-confident, she moved quickly to solve the difficult religious problem she had inherited from Mary, who had become extremely unpopular when she tried to return England to the Catholic fold.
• Elizabeth’s religious policy was based on moderation and compromise.
• As a ruler, she wished to prevent England from being torn apart over matters of religion.
• Elizabeth’s religious settlement was basically Protestant, but it was a moderate Protestant-ism that avoided overly subtle distinctions and extremes.
• The new religious settlement worked, at least to the extent that it smothered religious differences in England in the second half of the sixteenth century.
• One of Elizabeth’s greatest challenges came from her Catholic cousin, Mary, queen of Scots, who was next in line to the English throne.
• Mary was ousted from Scotland by rebellious Calvinist nobles in 1568 and fled for her life to England.
• There Elizabeth placed her under house arrest and for fourteen years tolerated her involvement in a number of ill-planned Catholic plots designed to kill Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with the Catholic Mary.
• Finally, in 1587, after Mary became embroiled in a far more serious plot, Elizabeth had her cousin beheaded to end the threats to her regime.
• Elizabeth proved as adept in government and foreign pol-icy as in religious affairs .
• The talents of Sir William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham, who together held the office for thirty-two years, ensured much of Elizabeth’s success in foreign and domestic affairs.

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