CHAPTER XX
The Faiths at War
1525–60

I. THE PROTESTANT ADVANCE: 1525–30

WHAT combination of forces and circumstances enabled nascent Protestantism to survive the hostility of both papacy and Empire? Mystical piety, Biblical studies, religious reform, intellectual development, Luther’s audacity, were not enough; they might have been diverted or controlled. Probably the economic factors were decisive: the desire to keep German wealth in Germany, to free Germany from papal or Italian domination, to transfer ecclesiastical property to secular uses, to repel Imperial encroachments upon the territorial, judicial, and financial authority of the German princes, cities, and states. Add certain political conditions that permitted the Protestant success. The Ottoman Empire, after conquering Constantinople and Egypt, was expanding dangerously in the Balkans and Africa, absorbing half of Hungary, besieging Vienna, and threatening to close the Mediterranean to Christian trade; Charles V and Archduke Ferdinand required a united Germany and Austria—Protestant as well as Catholic money and men—to resist this Moslem avalanche. The Emperor was usually engrossed in the affairs of Spain or Flanders or Italy, or in mortal conflict with Francis I of France; he had no time or funds for civil war in Germany. He agreed with his pensioner Erasmus that the Church badly needed reform; he was intermittently at odds with Clement VII and Paul III, even to allowing his army to sack Rome; only when Emperor and Pope were friends could they effectually combat the religious revolution.

But by 1527 the Lutheran “heresy” had become orthodoxy in half of Germany. The cities found Protestantism profitable; “they do not care in the least about religion,” mourned Melanchthon; “they are only anxious to get dominion into their hands, to be free from the control of the bishops”;¹ for a slight alteration in their theological garb they escaped from episcopal taxes and courts, and could appropriate pleasant parcels of ecclesiastical property.² Yet an honest desire for a simpler and sincerer religion seems to have moved many citizens. At Magdeburg the members of St. Ulrich’s parish met in the churchyard and chose eight men who were to select the preacher and manage the affairs of the church (1524); soon all churches in the city were administering the Lord’s Supper in the Lutheran mode. Augsburg was so fervently Protestant that when Campeggio came there as papal legate the populace dubbed him Antichrist (1524). Most of Strasbourg accepted the new theology from Wolfgang Fabricius Capito (1523), and Martin Bucer, who succeeded him there, also converted Ulm. In Nuremberg great business leaders like Lazarus Spengler and Hieronymus Baumgärtner won the city council to the Lutheran creed (1526); the Sebalduskirche and the Lorenzkirche transformed their ritual accordingly, while keeping their Catholic art. In Brunswick the writings of Luther were widely circulated; his hymns were publicly sung; his version of the New Testament was so earnestly studied that when a priest misquoted it he was corrected by the congregation; finally the city council ordered all clergymen to preach only what could be found in the Scriptures, to baptize in German, and to serve the sacrament in both forms (1528). By 1530 the new faith had won Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Lübeck, Stralsund, Danzig, Dorpat, Riga, Reval, and almost all the Imperial cities of Swabia. Iconoclastic riots broke out in Augsburg, Hamburg, Brunswick, Stralsund. Probably some of this violence was a reaction against the ecclesiastical use of statues and paintings to inculcate ridiculous and lucrative legends.

The princes, gladly adopting Roman law—which made the secular ruler omnipotent as delegate of the “sovereign people”—saw in Protestantism a religion that not only exalted the state but obeyed it; now they could be spiritual as well as temporal lords, and all the wealth of the Church could be theirs to administer or enjoy. John the Steadfast, who succeeded Frederick the Wise as Elector of Saxony (1525), definitely accepted the Lutheran faith, which Frederick had never done; and when John died (1532) his son John Frederick kept Electoral Saxony firmly Protestant. Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse, formed with John the League of Gotha and Torgau (1526) to protect and extend Lutheranism. Other princes fell in line: Ernest of Lüneburg, Otto and Francis of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Henry of Mecklenburg, Ulrich of Württemberg. Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, following Luther’s advice, abandoned his monastic vows, married, secularized the lands of his order, and made himself Duke of Prussia (1525). Luther saw himself, apparently by the mere force of his personality and eloquence, winning half of Germany.

Since many monks and nuns now left their convents, and the public seemed unwilling to support the remainder, the Lutheran princes suppressed all monasteries in their territory except a few whose inmates had embraced the Protestant faith. The princes agreed to share the confiscated properties and revenues with the nobles, the cities, and some universities, but this pledge was very laxly redeemed. Luther inveighed against the application of ecclesiastical wealth to any but religious or educational purposes, and condemned the precipitate seizure of church buildings and lands by the nobility. A modest part of the spoils was yielded to schools and poor relief; the princes and nobles kept the rest. “Under cover of the Gospel,” wrote Melanchthon (1530), “the princes were only intent on the plunder of the churches.” ³

For good or evil, for spiritual or material ends, the great transformation progressed. Whole provinces—East Friesland, Silesia, Schleswig, Holstein—went over almost unanimously to Protestantism; nothing could better show how moribund Catholicism had there become. Where priests survived, they continued their support of concubines,⁴ and clamored for permission to marry legally as the Lutheran clergy were doing.⁵ Archduke Ferdinand reported to the Pope that the desire for marriage was almost universal among the Catholic secular clergy, that out of a hundred pastors scarcely one was not openly or secretly married; and Catholic princes pleaded with the papacy that the abolition of celibacy had become a moral necessity.⁶ A loyal Catholic complained (1524) that the bishops, with revolution on their doorsteps, went on with their Lucullan feasts;⁷ and a Catholic historian, speaking of Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz, describes “the luxuriously furnished apartments which this unholy prince of the Church used for secret intercourse with his mistress.” ⁸ “Everybody,” says the same historian, “had become so hostile to priests that these were mocked and annoyed wherever they went.” ⁹ “The people everywhere,” wrote Erasmus (January 31, 1530), “are for the new doctrines.” ¹⁰ This was true, however, only in northern Germany; and even there Duke George of Saxony and Elector Joachim of Brandenburg were resolutely Catholic. Southern and western Germany—which had been part of the ancient Roman Empire, and had received some Latin culture—remained for the most part loyal to the Church; the gemütlich South preferred the gaily colorful and sexually lenient ways of Catholicism to the predestinarian stoicism of the North. The powerful elector-archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and (till 1543) Cologne kept their regions predominantly Catholic; and Pope Adrian VI saved Bavaria by granting its dukes, for their secular uses, a fifth of ecclesiastical income in their state. A similar grant of Church revenues appeased Ferdinand in Austria.

Hungary entered vitally into the drama. The premature accession of Louis II at the age of ten (1516), and his premature death, were formative elements in the Hungarian tragedy. Even his birth was premature; the medicos of his time barely saved the frail infant by enclosing it in the warm carcasses of animals slaughtered to give it heat. Louis grew into a handsome youth, kindly and generous, but given to extravagance and festivities on meager resources amid a corrupt and incompetent court. When Sultan Suleiman sent an ambassador to Buda the nobles refused to receive him, dragged him around the country, cut off his nose and ears, and turned him back to his master.¹¹ The infuriated Sultan invaded Hungary, and seized two of its most vital strongholds—Szabacs and Belgrade (1521). After long delays, and amid the treason or cowardice of his nobles, Louis raised an army of 25,000 men, and marched out with mad heroism to face 100,000 Turks on a field near Mohács (August 30, 1526). The Hungarians were slaughtered almost to a man, and Louis himself was drowned in stumbling flight. Suleiman entered Buda in triumph; his army sacked and burned the handsome capital, destroyed all its major buildings except the royal palace, and gave to the flames most of Matthias Corvinus’s precious library. The victorious host spread over the eastern half of Hungary, burning and pillaging, and Suleiman drove 100,000 Christian captives before him to Constantinople.

The surviving magnates divided into hostile factions. One group, judging resistance impossible, chose John Zápolya as king, and authorized him to sign a submissive peace; Suleiman allowed him to reign in Buda as his vassal, but the eastern half of Hungary remained in effect under Turkish domination till 1686. Another faction united with the nobles of Bohemia to give the crown of both Hungary and Bohemia to Ferdinand, in the hope of securing the aid of the Holy Roman Empire and the powerful Hapsburg family. When Suleiman returned to the attack (1529), marching 135 miles from Buda along the Danube to the gates of Vienna, Ferdinand successfully defended his capital. But during those critical years Charles V had been forced to humor the Protestants lest all Europe should fall to Islam. The westward advance of the Turks so obviously protected Protestantism that Philip of Hesse rejoiced at Turkish victories. When Suleiman, balked at Vienna, returned to Constantinople, Catholics and Protestants were free to renew their struggle for the soul of Germany.

II. THE DIETS DISAGREE: 1526–41

As internal liberty varies (other things equal) with external security, Protestantism, during its safe period, indulged in the sectarian fragmentation that seemed inherent in the principles of private judgment and the supremacy of conscience. Already in 1525 Luther wrote: “There are nowadays almost as many sects and creeds as there are heads.” ¹² Melanchthon was kept grievously busy moderating his master and finding ambiguous formulas for reconciling contradictory certitudes. Catholics pointed gleefully to the mutually recriminating Protestant factions, and predicted that freedom of interpretation and belief would lead to religious anarchy, moral disintegration, and a skepticism abominable to Protestants as well as Catholics.¹³ In 1525 three artists were banished from Protestant Nuremberg for questioning the divine authorship of the Bible, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and the divinity of Christ.

While Suleiman was preparing the campaign that cut Hungary in half, a Diet of German princes, prelates, and burghers met at Speyer (June 1526) to consider the demands of the Catholics that the Edict of Worms should be enforced, and the counterproposal of the Protestants that religion be left free until a general council under German auspices should adjudicate the disputes. The Protestants prevailed, and the concluding decree of this Diet ruled that—pending such a council—each German state, in religion, “should so live, rule, and bear itself as it thought it could answer to God and the Emperor”; that no one should be punished for past offenses against the Edict of Worms; and that the Word of God should be preached by all parties, none interfering with the others. The Protestants interpreted this “Recess of Speyer”* as sanctioning the establishment of Lutheran churches, the religious autonomy of each territorial prince, and the prohibition of the Mass in Lutheran areas. The Catholics rejected these assumptions, but the Emperor, embroiled with the Pope, accepted them for the time being; and Ferdinand was soon too busy with affairs in Hungary to make any effectual resistance.

Having made his peace with Clement, Charles returned to the natural conservatism of a king, and ordered the Diet of Speyer to reconvene on February 1, 1529. Under the influence of the presiding Archduke and the absent Emperor the new assembly repealed the “Recess” of 1526, and passed a decree permitting Lutheran services—but requiring the toleration of Catholic services—in Lutheran states, completely forbidding Lutheran preaching or ritual in Catholic states, enforcing the Edict of Worms, and outlawing Zwinglian and Anabaptist sects everywhere. On April 25, 1529, the Lutheran minority published a “Protest” declaring that conscience forbade their acceptance of this decree; they appealed to the Emperor for a general council; meanwhile they would adhere to the original Recess of Speyer at whatever cost. The term Protestant was applied by the Catholics to the signers of this Protest, and gradually came into use to designate the German rebels from Rome.

Still needing German unity against the Turks, Charles called another diet, which met at Augsburg (June 20, 1530) under his presidency. During this conference he stayed with Anton Fugger, now head of the firm that had made him emperor. According to an old story, the banker pleased the ruler by lighting a fire with an Imperial certificate of indebtedness.¹⁴ As the Fuggers were financially allied with the popes, the gesture may have moved Charles a step nearer to the papacy. Luther did not attend, for he was still under the Imperial ban, and might at any moment be arrested; but he went to Coburg, on the Saxon border, and kept in touch, through messengers, with the Protestant delegation. He compared the assembly to a congregation of jackdaws that chattered and maneuvered before his windows, and he complained that “each bishop brought as many devils” or voters to the Diet “as there are fleas on a dog on St. John’s Day.” ¹⁵ It was apparently at this time that he composed the greatest of his hymns—’ “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”—“A mighty fortress is our God.”

On June 24 Cardinal Campeggio appealed to the Diet for the utter suppression of the Protestant sects. On the twenty-fifth Christian Bayer read to the Emperor and a portion of the assembly the famous Augsburg Confession, which Melanchthon had prepared, and which, with some modifications, was to become the official creed of the Lutheran churches. Partly because he feared a war of the combined Imperial and papal forces against the divided Protestants, partly because he was by temperament inclined to compromise and peace, Melanchthon gave the statement (says a Catholic scholar) “a dignified, moderate, and pacific tone,”¹⁶ and strove to minimize the differences between the Catholic and Lutheran views. He expatiated on the heresies that the Evangelicals (as the Lutherans called themselves from their sole reliance on the Gospels or the New Testament) and the Roman Catholics alike condemned; he dissociated the Lutheran from the Zwinglian reform, and left the latter to shift for itself. He softened the doctrines of predestination, “consubstantiation,” and justification by faith; he spoke temperately of the ecclesiastical abuses that Protestantism had abated; he defended with courtesy the administration of the sacrament in both forms, the abolition of monastic vows, the marriage of the clergy; and he appealed to Cardinal Campeggio to accept this Confession in the conciliatory spirit in which it had been composed. Luther regretted some of the concessions, but gave the document his indispensable approval. Zwingli sent his own Ratio fidei to the Emperor, frankly stating his disbelief in the Real Presence. Strasbourg, Constance, Lindau, and Memmingen presented a separate Confession, the Tetrapolitana, in which Capito and Bucer struggled to bridge the gaps among the Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Catholic creeds.

The extreme faction of the Catholics, led by Eck, retorted with a Confutation so intransigeant that the assembly refused to submit it to the Emperor until it had been twice toned down. So revised, it insisted on transubstantiation, seven sacraments, the invocation of saints, clerical celibacy, communion in bread alone, and the Latin Mass. Charles approved this Confutation, and declared that the Protestants must accept it or face war, A milder party of Catholics entered into negotiation with Melanchthon, and offered to permit communion in bread and wine. Melanchthon in return agreed to recognize auricular confession, fasts, episcopal jurisdiction, even, with some provisos, the authority of the popes. But other Protestant leaders refused to go so far; Luther protested that the restoration of episcopal jurisdiction would subject the new ministers to the Roman hierarchy, and would soon liquidate the Reformation. Seeing agreement impossible, several Protestant princes left for their homes.

On November 19 the diminished Diet issued its final Recess or decree. All phases of Protestantism were condemned; the Edict of Worms was to be enforced; the Imperial Chamber of Justice (Reichskammergericht) was to start legal actions against all appropriators of ecclesiastical property; the Protestants were to have until April 15, 1531 to accept the Confutation peaceably. Charles’s signature made this “Recess of Augsburg” an Imperial decree. To the Emperor it must have seemed the height of reasonableness to give the rebels six months to adjust themselves to the will of the Diet. Within that period he offered them immunity from the Edict of Worms. Thereafter, if other duties would allow, he might have to submit the rival theologies to the supreme court of war.

While the Diet was yet in session several states formed a Catholic League for the defense and restoration of the traditional faith. Interpreting this as a martial gesture, Protestant princes and cities organized (March 1531) the Schmalkaldic League, which took its name from its birthplace near Erfurt. When the period of grace ran out, Ferdinand, now “King of the Romans,” proposed to Charles to begin war. But Charles was not yet ready. Suleiman was planning another attack upon Vienna; Suleiman’s confederate, Barbarossa, was raiding Christian commerce in the Mediterranean; and Suleiman’s ally, Francis of France, was waiting to pounce upon Milan the moment Charles became involved in a German civil war. In April 1531, instead of enforcing the Augsburg decree, he suspended it, and asked for Protestant aid against the Turks. Luther and the princes responded loyally; Lutherans and Catholics signed the Peace of Nuremberg (July 23, 1532), pledging united aid to Ferdinand, and mutual religious toleration until a general council should be convened. So numerous an army of Protestant and Catholic Germans, of Spanish and Italian Catholics, gathered under the Emperor’s standard at Vienna that Suleiman found the omens unfavorable and turned back to Constantinople, while the Christian army, drunk with its bloodless victory, plundered Christian towns and homes, “spreading greater disaster,” said eyewitness Thomas Cranmer of England, “than the Turks themselves.” ¹⁷

The patriotism of the Protestants gave their movement new dignity and impetus. When Aleander, again papal emissary, offered the Lutheran leaders a hearing at a general council if they would promise submission to the council’s final decisions, they rejected the proposal. A year later (1534) Philip of Hesse, disregarding Luther’s condemnation of any offensive policy, accepted French aid in restoring the Protestant Duke Ulrich to power in Wurttemberg. Ferdinand’s rule there was ended; the churches were pillaged, the monasteries were closed, and their property was taken by the state.¹⁸ Circumstances again favored the Protestants: Ferdinand was absorbed in the east, Charles in the west; the Anabaptists were apparently consolidating a communistic revolution in Münster; Jürgen Wullenwever’s radicals captured Lübeck (1535); the Catholic princes now needed Lutheran aid against internal revolt as much as against the Ottomans. Moreover, Scandinavia and England had by this time renounced Rome, and Catholic France was seeking the alliance of Lutheran Germany against Charles V.

Elated with this growing strength, the Schmalkaldic League voted to raise an army of 12,000 men. When the new pope, Paul III, asked on what terms the League would accept a general council, it replied that it would recognize only a council held independently of the pope, composed of the secular as well as the ecclesiastical leaders of Germany, and receiving the Protestants not as heretics but as equal participants.¹⁹ It repudiated the Imperial Chamber of Justice, and notified the Emperor’s vice-chancellor that it would not admit the right of Catholics to retain Church property, or to carry on their worship, in the territories of Protestant princes.²⁰ The Catholic states renewed their League, and demanded of Charles full enforcement of the powers given to the Reichskammergericht. He replied with gracious words, but fear of Francis I at his back kept him at bay.

The Protestant tide continued to flow. Says a Catholic historian:

When the Catholic Duke George of Albertine Saxony died he was succeeded by his brother Henry, a Lutheran; Henry in turn was succeeded by Maurice, who was to be the military savior of Protestantism in Germany. In 1539 Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg, set up in his capital at Berlin a Protestant Church proudly independent of both Rome and Wittenberg. In 1542 the duchy of Cleves, the bishopric of Naumburg, even Albrecht’s see of Halle, were added to the Protestant roster by timely mixtures of politics and war; and in 1543 Count Hermann von Wied, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, shocked Rome by transforming himself into a Lutheran. The Protestant leaders were so confident that in January 1540, Luther, Melanchthon, and others issued a declaration to the effect that peace could be had only through the renunciation, by the Emperor and the Catholic clergy, of their “idolatry and error,” and by their adoption of the “pure doctrine” of the Augsburg Confession. And the document proceeded: “Even if the Pope were to concede to us our doctrines and ceremonies, we should still be obliged to treat him as a persecutor and an outcast, since in other kingdoms he would not renounce his errors.” “It is all up with the Pope,” said Luther, “as it is with his god, the Devil.” ²²

Charles almost agreed, for in April 1540, he took the religious initiative from the Pope, and invited the Catholic and Protestant leaders of Germany to meet in “Christian colloquy” to seek again a peaceful settlement of their differences. “Unless the Pope intervenes decisively,” wrote a papal nuncio, “the whole of Germany will fall a prey to Protestantism.” At a preliminary conference in Worms a long debate between Eck and Melanchthon resulted in the tentative acceptance, by the previously intransigeant Catholic, of the mild positions formulated in the Augsburg Confession.²³ Encouraged, Charles summoned the two groups to Ratisbon (Regensburg). There, under his leadership (April 5-May 22, 1541), they made their closest approach to a settlement. Paul III was disposed to peace, and his chief delegate, Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, was a man of good will and high moral character. The Emperor, harassed by threats from France and appeals from Ferdinand for help against the returning Turks, was so anxious for an agreement that many Catholic leaders suspected him of Protestant leanings. The conference concurred in permitting marriage of the clergy and communion in both kinds; but no legerdemain could find a formula at once affirming and denying the religious supremacy of the popes, and transubstantiation in the Eucharist; and Contarini was not amused by a Protestant query whether a mouse that nibbled at a fallen consecrated Host was eating bread or God.²⁴ The conference failed, but Charles, hurrying off to war, gave an interim pledge to the Protestants that there would be no proceedings against them for holding the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession, or for retaining confiscated Church property.

During these years of controversy and growth the new faith had created a new Church. At Luther’s suggestion it called itself Evangelical. He had originally advocated an ecclesiastical democracy, in which each congregation would select its own minister and determine its own ritual and creed; but his increasing dependence on the princes compelled him to surrender these prerogatives to commissions appointed by, and responsible to, the state. In 1525 Elector John of Saxony ordered all churches in his duchy to adopt an Evangelical service as formulated by Melanchthon with Luther’s approval; priests who refused to obey lost their benefices, and obstinate laymen, after a period of grace, were exiled.²⁵ Other Lutheran princes followed a similar procedure. As a doctrinal guide for the new churches Luther drew up a five-page Kleiner Katechismus (1529), consisting of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and brief interpretations of each article. It would have been considered quite orthodox in the first four centuries of Christianity.

The new ministers were generally men of good morals, learned in Scripture, careless of humanistic erudition, and devoted to the tasks of their pastorates. Sunday was observed as the Sabbath; here Luther accepted tradition rather than the Bible. “Divine service” retained much of the Catholic ritual—altar, cross, candles, vestments, and parts of the Mass in German; but a larger role was given to the sermon, and there were no prayers to the Virgin or the saints. Religious paintings and statues were discarded. Church architecture was transformed to bring the worshipers within easier hearing of the preacher; hence galleries became a regular feature of Protestant churches. The most pleasant innovation was the active participation of the congregation in the music of the ceremony. Even the noteless long to sing, and now every voice could fondly hear itself in the protective anonymity of the crowd. Luther became overnight a poet, and wrote didactic, polemical, and inspirational hymns of a rough and masculine power typical of his character. Not only did the worshipers sing these and other Protestant hymns; they were called together during the week to rehearse them; and many families sang them in the home. A worried Jesuit reckoned that “the hymns of Luther killed [converted] more souls than his sermons.” ²⁶ The Protestant music of the Reformation rose to rival the Catholic painting of the Renaissance.

III. THE LION OF WITTENBERG: 1536–46

Luther took no direct part in the pacific conferences of these his declining years; the princes rather than the theologians were now the Protestant leaders, for the issues concerned property and power far more than dogma and ritual. Luther was not made for negotiation, and he was getting too old to fight with weapons other than the pen. A papal envoy described him in 1535 as still vigorous and heartily humorous (“the first question he asked me was whether I had heard the report, current in Italy, that he was a German sot” ²⁷); but his expanding frame harbored a dozen diseases—indigestion, insomnia, dizziness, colic, stones in the kidneys, abscesses in the ears, ulcers, gout, rheumatism, sciatica, and palpitation of the heart. He used alcoholic drinks to dull his pain and bring him sleep; he sampled the drugs that the doctors prescribed for him; and he tried impatient prayer; the diseases progressed. In 1537 he thought he would die of the stone, and he issued an ultimatum to the Deity: “If this pain lasts longer I shall go mad and fail to recognize Thy goodness.” ²⁸ His deteriorating temper was in part an expression of his suffering. His friends increasingly avoided him, for “hardly one of us,” said a saddened votary, “can escape his anger and his public scourging”; and the patient Melanchthon winced under frequent humiliations by his rough-hewn idol. As for “Oecolampadius, Calvin .... and the other heretics,” said Luther, “they have in-deviled, through-deviled, over-deviled, corrupt hearts and lying mouths.” ²⁹

He tried hard to be reasonable in his treatise On the Councils and the Churches (1539). He compared the various papal promises and postponements of a general council to teasing a hungry animal by offering food and snatching it away. With considerable learning he reviewed conciliar history, and noted that several ecclesiastical councils had been called and presided over by emperors—a hint to Charles. He doubted if any council called by a pope would reform the Curia. Before sanctioning Protestant attendance at a Church council “we must first condemn the bishop of Rome as a tyrant, and burn all his bulls and decretals.” ³⁰

His political opinions in his later years suggest that silence is trebly golden after sixty. He had always been politically conservative, even when appearing to encourage social revolution. His religious revolt was against practice rather than theory; he objected to the high cost of indulgences, and later to papal domination, but he accepted to the end of his life the most difficult doctrines of orthodox Christianity—Trinity, Virgin Birth, Atonement, Real Presence, hell—and made some of these more indigestible than before. He despised the common people, and would have corrected Lincoln’s famous error on that spawn of carelessness. Herr Omnes—Mr. Crowd—needs strong government, “lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and commerce... be destroyed.... . No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood.... The world cannot be ruled with a rosary.”³¹ But when government by rosaries lost its power, government by the sword had to take its place. So Luther had to transfer to the state most of the authority that had been held by the Church; therefore he defended the divine right of kings. “The hand that wields the secular sword is not a human hand but the hand of God. It is God, not man, Who hangs, and breaks on the wheel, and decapitates, and flogs; it is God who wages war.” ³² In this exaltation of the state as now the sole source of order lay the seeds of the absolutist philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel, and a premonition of Imperial Germany. In Luther Henry IV brought Hildebrand to Canossa.

As he aged Luther became more conservative than the princes. He approved the exaction of forced labor and heavy feudal dues from the peasant; and when one baron had twitches of conscience Luther reassured him on the ground that if such burdens were not imposed upon them commoners would become overbearing.³³ He quoted the Old Testament as justifying slavery. “Sheep, cattle, men-servants, and maid-servants were all possessions to be sold as it pleased their masters. It were a good thing were it still so. For else no man may compel nor tame the servile folk.” ³⁴ Every man should stay patiently in the task and walk of life to which God has assigned him. “To serve God is for everyone to remain in his vocation and calling, be it ever so mean and simple.” This conception of vocation became a pillar of conservatism in Protestant lands.

A prince who had been a loyal supporter of the Protestant cause brought Luther an uncomfortable problem in 1539. Philip of Hesse was at once warlike, amorous, and conscientious. His wife, Christine of Savoy, was a faithful and fertile eyesore; Philip hesitated to divorce one so deserving, but he powerfully desired Margaret of Saale, whom he had met while convalescing from syphilis.³⁵ After practicing adultery for some time he decided that he was in a state of sin, and must abstain from the Lord’s Supper. This proving inconvenient, he suggested to Luther that the new religion, so indebted to the Old Testament, should, like it, allow bigamy—for which, however, the prevailing legal penalty was death. After all, was this not more seemly than Francis I’s succession of mistresses, and more humane than Henry VIII’s executive husbandry? So anxious was Philip for his Biblical solution that he intimated his defection to the Imperial, even the papal, camp, if the Wittenberg theologians could not see the Scriptural light. Luther was ready; indeed, in The Babylonian Captivity he had preferred bigamy to divorce; he had recommended bigamy as the best solution for Henry VIII;³⁶ and many theologians of the sixteenth century had an open mind on the matter.³⁷ Melanchthon was reluctant; he finally agreed with Luther that their consent should be given, but that it should be withheld from the public. Christine consented too, on condition that Philip “was to fulfill his marital duties toward her more than ever before.” ³⁸ On March 4, 1540, Philip formally but privately married Margaret as an additional wife, in the presence of Melanchthon and Bucer. The grateful Landgrave sent Luther a cartload of wine as a pourboire ³⁹ When news of the marriage leaked out Luther denied giving consent; “the secret Yea,” he wrote, “must for the sake of Christ’s Church remain a public Nay.” ⁴⁰ Melanchthon fell seriously ill, apparently with remorse and shame, and refused to eat until Luther threatened to excommunicate him.⁴¹ Melanchthon, wrote Luther, “is terribly grieved about this scandal, but I am a tough Saxon and a sturdy peasant, and my skin has grown thick enough to bear such things.” ⁴² Most Evangelicals, however, were scandalized. Catholics were amused and delighted, not knowing that Pope Clement VII had himself thought of allowing bigamy to Henry VIII.⁴³ Ferdinand of Austria announced that though he had had some inclination toward the new faith, he now abhorred it. Charles V, as the price of not prosecuting Philip, exacted from him a pledge of support in all future political divisions.

Luther’s temper became hot lava as he neared the grave. In 1545 he attacked the Zwinglian “Sacramentarians” with such violence that Melanchthon mourned the widened chasm between the Protestants of the South and the North. Asked by Elector John to restate the case against participation in a papally directed council, Luther sent forth a tirade Against the Papacy at Rome Founded by the Devil (1545), in which his flair for vituperation surpassed itself. All his friends were shocked except the painter Lucas Cranach, who illustrated the book with woodcuts of unrestrained satire. One showed the Pope riding on a hog and blessing a heap of dung; another chained him and three cardinals to gibbets; and the frontispiece pictured the Pontiff on his throne surrounded by devils and crowned with a scavenger’s bucket. The word devil peppered the text; the Pope was “the most hellish father,” “this Roman hermaphrodite” and “Sodomite pope”; the cardinals were “desperately lost children of the Devil... ignorant asses.... One would like to curse them so that thunder and lightning might smite them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them.” ⁴⁴ He repudiated again the notion that the Holy Roman Empire was a gift of the popes; on the contrary, he thought, the time had come for the Empire to absorb the Papal States.

Perhaps his mind had begun to fail when he wrote this clarion call to violence. The gradual poisoning of the internal organs by time and food and drink may have reached and injured the brain. In his last years Luther became uncomfortably stout, with hanging jowls and convoluted chin. He had been a volcano of energy, a restless Leviathan, saying Rast Ich, so rost Ich—“If I rest I rust.” ⁴⁶ But now spells of weariness came upon him; he de-scribed himself (January 17, 1546) as “old, decrepit, sluggish, weary, cold, with but one good eye.” ⁴⁷ “I am tired of the world, and it is tired of me,” he wrote; ⁴⁸ and when the Electress Dowager of Saxony wished him forty more years of life, he answered, “Madam, rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of paradise.” ⁴⁹ “I pray the Lord will come forth-with and carry me hence. Let Him come, above all, with His Last Judgment; 1 will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest.” ⁵⁰ To the end he continued to have visions of the Devil; and, now and then, doubts of his mission. “The Devil assaults me by objecting that out of my mouth great offenses and much evil have proceeded; and with this he many times vehemently perplexes me.” ⁵¹ Sometimes he despaired of the future of Protestantism: “godly servants of the Most High become rarer and rarer”;⁵² sects and factions grow in number and bitterness; and “after Melanchthon’s death there will be a sad falling off” in the new faith.⁵³ But then his courage returned. “I have set Christ and the pope together by the ears, so I trouble myself no further. Though I get between the door and the hinges and be squeezed, it is no matter; Christ will go through with it.” ⁵⁴

His will began in full character: “I am well known in heaven, on earth, and in hell.” It told how he, “a damnable and miserable sinner,” had received from God the grace to spread the Gospel of His Son, and how he had won recognition as “a doctor of truth, spurning the ban of pope, emperor, kings, princes, and priests, and the hatred of all the demons.” And it concluded: “Wherefore, for the disposition of my meager estate let the present witness of my hand suffice; and let it be said: ‘Dr. Martin Luther, notary of God and the witness of His Gospel, wrote this.’ “⁵⁵ He did not doubt that God was waiting to welcome him.

In January 1546, he went through wintry weather to Eisleben, the place of his birth, to arbitrate a dispute. During his absence he sent charming letters to his wife—as on February 1 :

He dined merrily on February 17. Early the next morning he fell ill with violent stomach pains. He weakened rapidly, and the friends who gathered by his bedside made it clear that he was dying. One of them asked him, “Reverend father, will you stand steadfast by Christ and the doctrine you have preached?” He answered, “Yes.” Then an apoplectic stroke deprived him of speech, and in its course he died (February 18, 1546). The body was taken back to Wittenberg, and was buried in the Castle Church on whose door he had pinned his Theses twenty-nine years before.

Those years were among the most momentous in history, and Luther had been their strident and dominant voice. His faults were many. He lacked appreciation of the historic role that the Church had played in civilizing northern Europe, lacked understanding of mankind’s hunger for symbolic and consolatory myths, lacked the charity to deal justly with his Catholic or Protestant foes. He freed his followers from an infallible pope, but subjected them to an infallible book; and it has been easier to change the popes than the book. He retained the most cruel and incredible dogmas of medieval religion, while allowing almost all its beauty to be stamped out in its legends and its art, and bequeathed to Germany a Christianity no truer than the old one, far less joyous and comforting, only more honest in its teaching and personnel. He became almost as intolerant as the Inquisition, but his words were harsher than his deeds. He was guilty of the most vituperative writing in the history of literature. He taught Germany the theological hatred that incarnadined its soil until a hundred years after his death.

And yet his faults were his success. He was a man of war because the situation seemed to demand war, because the problems he attacked had for centuries resisted all the methods of peace. His whole life was a battle—against the sense of guilt, against the Devil, the Pope, the Emperor, Zwingli, even against the friends who would have compromised his revolt into a gentlemanly protest politely heard and carefully forgotten. What could a milder man have done against such handicaps and powers? No man of philosophic breadth, no scientific mind restricting belief to the evidence, no genial nature making generous allowances for the enemy, would have flung down so world-shaking a challenge, or would have marched so resolutely, as if in blinders, to his goal. If his predestinarian theology was as repugnant to reason and human kindness as any myth or miracle in the medieval faith, it was by this passionate irrationality that it moved the hearts of men, It is hope and terror that make men pray, not the evidence of things seen.

It remains that with the blows of his rude fist he smashed the cake of custom, the shell of authority, that had blocked the movement of the European mind. If we judge greatness by influence—which is the least subjective test that we can use—we may rank Luther with Copernicus, Voltaire, and Darwin as the most powerful personalities in the modern world. More has been written about him than about any other modern man except Shakespeare and Napoleon. His influence on philosophy was tardy and indirect; it moved the fideism of Kant, the nationalism of Fichte, the voluntarism of Schopenhauer, the Hegelian surrender of the soul to the state. His influence on German literature and speech was as decisive and pervasive as that of the King James Bible on language and letters in England. No other German is so frequently or so fondly quoted. Along with Carlstadt and others, he affected the moral life and institutions of Western man by breaking away from clerical celibacy, and pouring into secular life the energies that had been diverted to monastic asceticism, idleness, or piety. His influence lessened as it spread; it was immense in Scandinavia, transitory in France, superseded by Calvin’s in Scotland, England, and America. But in Germany it was supreme; no other thinker or writer cut so deep a mark into the German mind and character. He was the most powerful figure in German history, and his countrymen love him not less because he was the most German German of them all.

IV. THE TRIUMPH OF PROTESTANTISM: 1542–55

He died just a year before a disaster that seemed fatal to Protestantism in Germany.

In 1545 Charles V, helped by Lutheran troops, compelled Francis I to sign the Peace of Crépy. Suleiman, at war with Persia, gave the West a fiveyear truce. Pope Paul III promised the Emperor 1,100,000 ducats, 12,000 infantry, 500 horse, if he would turn his full force against the heretics. Charles felt that at last he might effect what all along had been his hope and policy: to crush Protestantism, and give to his realm a unified Catholic faith that would, he thought, strengthen and facilitate his government. How could he be a real emperor in Germany if Protestant princes continued to flout his authority, and to dictate the terms on which they would accept him? He had not taken Protestantism seriously as a religion; the disputes between Luther and the Catholic theologians meant little or nothing to him; but Protestantism as the theology of princes leagued in arms against him, as a political power capable of determining the next Imperial election, as the faith of pamphleteers who lampooned him, of artists who caricatured him, of preachers who called him Son of Satan⁵⁷—this he could bear in somber silence when he had to; but now for a fleeting season he was free to fight back, and to mold his chaotic realm into one faith and force. He decided for war.

In May 1546, he mobilized his Spanish, Italian, German, and Lowland troops, and summoned to his side the Duke of Alva, his ablest general. When the Protestant princes dispatched delegates to him at Ratisbon to ask the meaning of his moves, he answered that he intended to restore Germany to Imperial obedience. During that conference he won to his support the most competent military leader in Germany, the young and ambitious Duke Maurice of Albertine Saxony. The Fuggers promised financial aid, and the Pope issued a bull excommunicating all who should resist Charles, and offering liberal indulgences to all who should aid him, in this holy war. Charles proclaimed the Imperial ban against Duke John of Ernestine Saxony and Landgrave Philip of Hesse; he absolved their subjects from allegiance to them, and vowed to confiscate their lands and goods. To divide the opposition he announced that he would not interfere with Protestantism where it was definitely established; his brother Ferdinand made a like pledge to Bohemia; and Maurice was tied to the cause by a promise that he would replace John as Elector of Saxony. Hopeful or fearful, the electors of Cologne and Brandenburg, the count Palatine, and Protestant Nuremberg remained neutral. Realizing that not only their theology but their goods and persons were at stake, John of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, the princes of Anhalt, the cities of Augsburg, Strasbourg, and Ulm mobilized all their forces, and put into the field 57,000 men.

But when John and Philip marched south to challenge Charles, Ferdinand moved north and west to seize John’s duchy; and Maurice, to have a finger in the pie, joined him in invading Ernestine Saxony. Appraised of this, John hurried north to defend his duchy. He did it brilliantly; but meanwhile Philip’s troops began to desert for lack of pay, and the Protestant cities, lured by promises of fair play, sued for peace with Charles, who let them off with heavy fines that broke the financial backbone of their freedom. Charles was now as superior in arms as in diplomacy. The only force favoring the Protestants was the Pope. Paul III had begun to fear too great a success for the Emperor; if no Protestant princes should survive to check the Imperial power, it would establish itself as supreme in northern as well as southern Italy, would surround or absorb the Papal States, and would irresistibly dominate the papacy. Suddenly (January 1547) Paul ordered the papal troops who were with Charles to leave him and return to Italy. They gladly obeyed. The Pope found himself heretically rejoicing over the victories of Elector John in Saxony.

But Charles was determined to bring the campaign to a decision. Marching north, he met the depleted forces of the Elector at Mühlberg on the Meissen, routed them completely (April 24, 1547), and took John captive. Ferdinand demanded the execution of the doughty prince; canny Charles agreed to commute the sentence to life imprisonment if Wittenberg would open its gates to him; it did, and the capital of German Protestantism fell into Catholic hands while Luther slept peacefully under a slab in the Castle Church. Maurice of Saxony and Joachim of Brandenburg persuaded Philip of Hesse to surrender on their promise that he would soon be freed. Charles had made no such pledge; the extent of his geniality was to promise Philip release after fifteen years. No one seemed left to challenge the victorious Emperor. Henry VIII had died on January 28, Francis I on March 31. Never since Charlemagne had the Imperial power been so great.

But the winds of fortune veered again. German princes, assembled in another diet at Augsburg (September 1547), resisted the efforts of Charles to consolidate his military victory into a legal autocracy. Paul III accused him of conniving at the murder of Pierluigi Farnese, the Pope’s natural son; and Bavaria, ever loyal to the Church, turned against the Emperor. A Protestant majority re-formed among the princes, and wrung from Charles his temporary consent to clerical marriage, the double administration of the sacrament, and the Protestant retention of Church property (1548). The Pope fumed at the Emperor’s assumption of power to rule on such ecclesiastical matters, and Catholics murmured that Charles was more interested in extending his Empire and entrenching the Hapsburgs than in restoring the one true faith. Maurice, now Elector of Saxony at Wittenberg, found himself, Protestant and victorious, dangerously unpopular amid a population Protestant and conquered; his treachery had poisoned the power it had won. His appeals to Charles to free the Landgrave were ignored. He began to wonder had he chosen the better part. Secretly he joined the Protestant princes in the Treaty of Chambord (January 1552), by which Henry II of France promised aid in expelling Charles from Germany. While Henry invaded Lorraine and seized Metz, Toul, and Verdun, Maurice and his Protestant allies marched south with 30,000 men. Charles, resting on his laurels at Innsbruck, had carelessly disbanded his troops; he had now no defense except diplomacy, and even at that shifty game Maurice proved his match. Ferdinand proposed an armistice; Maurice prolonged the negotiations courteously, meanwhile advancing on Innsbruck. On May 9, accompanied only by a few attendants, Charles moved painfully, by litter, through rain and snow and the night, over the Brenner Pass to Villach in Carinthia. One throw of fortune’s dice had transformed the master of Europe into a gouty fugitive shivering in the Alps.

On May 26 Maurice and the triumphant Protestants met with Ferdinand and some Catholic leaders at Passau. Charles, after a long interlude of selfdeflation, consented to have Ferdinand sign a treaty (August 2, 1552) by which Philip was to be released, the Protestant armies were to disband, both Protestants and Catholics were to enjoy freedom of worship till a new diet could meet, and if that diet failed to reach an acceptable settlement, this freedom of worship should continue forever—a favorite word in treaties. Maurice had begun with treachery, and had risen to victorious statesmanship; soon (1553) he would die for his country at the age of thirty in battle against Albrecht Alcibiades, who had turned half of Germany into an anarchy perilous to all.

Charles, despairing of a solution for his problems in Germany, turned west to renew his struggle with France. Ferdinand presided with patience over the historic Diet of Augsburg (February 5-September 25, 1555), which at last, for half a century, gave Germany peace. He saw that the territorial principle of ducal freedom was too strong to allow such a central and absolute sovereignty as the kings had won in France. The Catholic representatives were a majority in the Diet, but the Protestants, superior in military power, bound themselves to stand by every article of the Augsburg Confession of 1530; the Elector Augustus, who had succeeded Maurice in Saxony, adhered to the Protestant view; and the Catholics perceived that they must yield or renew the war. Charles, in the senility of his diplomacy, urged the electors to name his son Philip as his successor to the Imperial title; even the Catholics dreaded the prospect of that dour Spaniard ruling them; and Ferdinand, aspiring to the same throne, could not hope to win without Protestant support in the electoral college.

Arms and circumstances so favored the Protestants that they demanded everything: they were to be free in the practice of their faith in all German territory; Catholic worship was to be forbidden in Lutheran territory; present and future confiscations of Church property were to be held valid and irrevocable.⁵⁸ Ferdinand and Augustus worked out a compromise that in four famous words—cuius regio eius religio—embodied the spiritual infirmity of the nation and the age. In order to permit peace among and within the states each prince was to choose between Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism; all his subjects were to accept “his religion whose realm” it was; and those who did not like it were to emigrate. There was no pretense on either side to toleration; the principle which the Reformation had upheld in the youth of its rebellion—the right of private judgment—was as completely rejected by the Protestant leaders as by the Catholics. That principle had led to such a variety and clash of sects that the princes felt justified in restoring doctrinal authority, even if it had to be fractured into as many parts as there were states. The Protestants now agreed with Charles and the popes that unity of religious belief was indispensable to social order and peace; and we cannot judge them fairly unless we visualize the hatred and strife that were consuming Germany. The results were bad and good: toleration was now definitely less after the Reformation than before it;⁵⁹ but the princes banished dissenters instead of burning them—a rite reserved for witches; and the resultant multiplication of infallibilities weakened them all.

The real victor was not freedom of worship but the freedom of the princes. Each became, like Henry VIII of England, the supreme head of the Church in his territory, with the exclusive right to appoint the clergy and the men who should define the obligatory faith. The “Erastian” principle—that the state should rule the Church—was definitely established.* As it was the princes, not the theologians, who had led Protestantism to its triumph, they naturally assumed the fruits of victory—their territorial supremacy over the emperor, their ecclesiastical supremacy over the Church. Protestantism was nationalism extended to religion. But the nationalism was not that of Germany; it was the patriotism of each principality; German unity was not furthered, it was hindered, by the religious revolution; but it is not certain that unity would have been a blessing. When Ferdinand was chosen emperor (1558) his Imperial powers were less than those that even the harassed and hampered Charles had possessed. In effect the Holy Roman Empire died not in 1806 but in 1555.

The German cities, like the Empire, lost in the triumph of the princes. The Imperial communes had been wards of the emperor, protected by him against domination by the territorial rulers; now that the emperor was crippled the princes were free to interfere in municipal affairs, and communal independence waned. Meanwhile the growing vigor of Holland absorbed most of the trade that poured German products into the North Sea through the mouths of the Rhine; and the southern cities languished with the relative commercial decline of Venice and the Mediterranean. Commercial and political enfeeblement brought cultural decay; not for two centuries to come would the German towns show again the vitality of trade and thought that had preceded and supported the Reformation.

Melanchthon, surviving the Peace of Augsburg by five years, was not sure that he wanted the reprieve. He had outlived his leadership, not only in negotiations with the Catholics but in the determination of Protestant theology. He had so far liberated himself from Luther as to reject complete predestination and the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist,⁶⁰ and he struggled to maintain the importance of good works while insisting with Luther that they could not earn salvation. A bitter controversy arose between “Philippists”—Melanchthon and his followers—and the orthodox Lutherans, who fulminated chiefly from Jena; these called Melanchthon “an apostate Mameluke” and “servant of Satan”; he described them as idolatrous sophistical blockheads.⁶¹ Professors were engaged or dismissed, imprisoned or released, as the tides of theological lava ebbed or flowed. The two parties agreed in proclaiming the right of the state to suppress heresy by force. Melanchthon followed Luther in sanctioning serfdom and upholding the divine right of kings;⁶² but he wished that the Lutheran movement, instead of allying itself with the princes, had sought rather the protection of municipal burgher aristocracies, as in Zurich, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and Geneva. In his most characteristic moments he spoke like the Erasmian that he had hoped to be: “Let us speak only of the Gospel, of human weakness and divine mercy, of the organization of the Church, and the true worship. To reassure souls and give them a rule of right action—is this not the essence of Christianity? The rest is scholastic debate, sectarian disputes.”⁶³ When death came to him he welcomed it as a benign liberation from the “fury of theologians” and the “barbarity” of “this sophistical age.” ⁶⁴ History had miscast as a general in a revolutionary war a spirit that nature had made for scholarship, friendliness, and peace.