GERMANY BEFORE THE PROTESTANT REVOLT

133. By far the most important event in the sixteenth century and one of the most momentous in the history of the western world, was the revolt of a considerable portion of northern and western Europe from the mediaeval Church. There had been but two serious rebellions earlier. The first of these was that of the Albigenses in southern France in the thirteenth century; this had been fearfully punished, and the Inquisition had been established to ferret out and bring to trial those who were disloyal to the Church. Then, some two centuries later, the Bohemians, under the inspiration of Wycliffe’s writings, had attempted to introduce customs different from those which prevailed elsewhere in the Church. They, too, had been forced, after a terrific series of conflicts, once more to accept the old system.

Finally, however, in spite of the great strength and the wonderful organization of the Church, it became apparent that it was no longer possible to keep all of western Europe under the sway of the pope. In the autumn of 1520, Professor Martin Luther called together the students of the University of Wittenberg, led them outside the town walls, and there burned the constitution and statutes of the mediaeval Church, i.e., the canon law. In this way he publicly proclaimed and illustrated his purpose to repudiate the existing Church with many of its doctrines and practices. Its head he defied by destroying the papal bull directed against his teachings.

Other leaders, in Germany, Switzerland, England, and elsewhere, organized separate revolts; rulers decided to accept the teachings of the reformers, and used their power to promote the establishment of churches independent of the pope. In this way western Europe came to be divided into two great religious parties. The majority of its people continued to regard the pope as their religious head and to accept the institutions under which their forefathers had lived since the times of Theodosius. In general, those regions (except England) which had formed a part of the Roman empire remained Roman Catholic in their belief. On the other hand, northern Germany, a part of Switzerland, England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries sooner or later rejected the headship of the pope and many of the institutions and doctrines of the mediaeval Church, and organized new religious institutions. The Protestants, as those who seceded from the Church of Rome were called, by no means agreed among themselves what particular system should replace the old one. They were at one, however, in ceasing to obey the pope and in proposing to revert to the early Church as their model and accepting the Bible as their sole guide.

To revolt against the Church was to inaugurate a fundamental revolution in many of the habits and customs of the people. It was not merely a change of religious belief, for the Church permeated every occupation and dominated every social interest. For centuries it had directed and largely controlled education, high and low. Each and every important act in the home, in the guild, in the town, was accompanied by religious ceremonies. The clergy of the Roman Catholic Church had hitherto written most of the books; they sat in the government assemblies, acted as the rulers’ most trusted ministers, constituted, in short, outside of Italy, the only really educated class. Their rôlé and the rôlé of the Church were incomparably more important than that of any church which exists to-day.

Just as the mediaeval Church was by no means an exclusively religious institution, so the Protestant revolt was by no means simply a religious change, but a social and political one as well. The conflicts which the attempt to overthrow this institution, or rather social order, brought about were necessarily terrific. They lasted for more than two centuries and left no interest, public or private, social or individual, earthly or heavenly, unaffected. Nation rose against nation, kingdom against kingdom; households were divided among themselves; wars and commotion, wrath and desolation, treachery and cruelty filled the states of western Europe.

Our present object is to learn how this successful revolt came about, what was its real nature, and why the results were what they were. In order to do this, it is necessary to turn to the Germany in which Luther lived and see how the nation had been prepared to sympathize with his attack on the Church.

134. To us to-day, Germany means the German Empire, one of the three or four best organized and most powerful of the European states. It is a compact federation, somewhat like that of the United States, made up of twenty-two monarchies and three little city republics. Each member of the union manages its local affairs, but leaves all questions of national importance to be settled by the central government at Berlin. This federation is, however, of very recent date, being scarcely more than thirty years old.

In the time of Charles V there was no such Germany as this, but only what the French called “the Germanies”; i.e., two or three hundred states, which differed greatly from one another in size and character. One had a duke, another a count at its head, while some were ruled over by archbishops, bishops, or abbots. There were many cities, like Nuremberg, Augsburg, Frankfort, and Cologne, which were just as independent as the great duchies of Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Saxony. Lastly there were the knights, whose possessions might consist of no more than a single strong castle with a wretched village lying at its foot. Their trifling territories must, however, be called states; for some of the knights were at that time as sovereign and independent as the elector of Brandenburg, who was one day to become the king of Prussia, and long after, the emperor of Germany.

As for the emperor, he no longer had any power to control his vassals. He could boast of unlimited pretensions and a great past, but he had neither money nor soldiers. At the time of Luther’s birth the poverty-stricken Frederick III might have been seen picking up a free meal at a monastery, or riding behind a slow but economical ox team. The real power in Germany lay in the hands of the more important vassals. First and foremost among these were the seven electors, so called because, since the thirteenth century, they had enjoyed the right to elect the emperor. Three of them were archbishops kings in all but name of considerable territories on the Rhine, namely, of the electorates of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne. Near them, to the south, was the region ruled over by the elector of the Palatinate; to the northeast were the territories of the electors of Brandenburg and of Saxony; the king of Bohemia made the seventh of the group. Beside these states, the dominions of other rulers scarcely less important than the electors appear on the map. Some of these territories, like Würtemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden, are familiar to us to-day as members of the present German empire, but all of them have been much enlarged since the sixteenth century by the absorption of the little states that formerly lay within and about them.

The towns, which had grown up since the great economic revolution that had brought in commerce and the use of money in the thirteenth century, were centers of culture in the north of Europe, just as those of Italy were in the south. Nuremberg, the most beautiful of the German cities, still possesses a great part of the extraordinary buildings and works of art which it produced in the sixteenth century. Some of the towns held directly of the emperor, and were consequently independent of the particular prince within whose territory they were situated. These were called free, or imperial, cities and must be reckoned among the states of Germany.

The knights, who ruled over the smallest of the German territories, had once formed an important military class, but the invention of gunpowder and of new methods of fighting had made their individual prowess of little avail. As their tiny realms were often too small to support them, they frequently turned to out-and-out robbery for a living. They hated the cities because the prosperous burghers were able to live in a luxurious comfort which the poor knights envied but could not imitate. They hated the princes because these were anxious to incorporate into their own territories the inconvenient little districts controlled by the knights, many of whom, like the free cities, held directly of the emperor, and were consequently practically independent.

It would be no easy task to make a map of Germany in the time of Charles V sufficiently detailed to show all the states and scattered fragments of states. If, for example, the accompanying map were much larger and indicated all the divisions, it would be seen that the territory of the city of Ulm completely surrounded the microscopic possessions of a certain knight, the lord of Eybach, and two districts belonging to the abbot of Elchingen. On its borders lay the territories of four knights, the lords of Rechberg, Stotzingen, Erbach, and Wiesensteig, and of the abbots of Soflingen and Wiblingen, besides portions of Würtemberg and outlying Austrian possessions. The main cause of this bewildering subdivision of Germany was the habit of dealing with a principality as if it were merely private property which might be divided up among several children, or disposed of piecemeal, quite regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants.

It is clear that these states, little and big, all tangled up with one another, would be sure to have disputes among themselves which would have to be settled in some way. It would appear to have been absolutely necessary under the circumstances that there should be some superior court or judge to adjust differences between the many members of the empire, as well as a military or police force to carry out the will of the tribunal, should one of the parties concerned resist its decrees. But although there was an imperial court, it followed the emperor about and was therefore hard to get at. Moreover, even if a decision was obtained from it, there was no way for the aggrieved party to secure the execution of the judgment, for the emperor had no force sufficient to coerce the larger states. The natural result was a resort to self-help. Neighborhood war was permitted by law if only some courteous preliminaries were observed. For instance, a prince or town was required to give warning three days in advance before attacking another member of the empire.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century the terrible disorder and uncertainty which resulted from the absence of a strong central government led to serious efforts upon the part of the diet, or national assembly, to remedy the evils. It was proposed to establish a court to settle all disputes which should arise among the rulers of the various states. This was to be held permanently in some convenient place. The empire was also to be divided into districts, or “circles,” in each of which a military force was to be organized and maintained to carry out the law and the decisions of the court. Little was accomplished, however, for some years, although the diet met more frequently and regularly, and this gave an opportunity to discuss public questions. The towns began to send delegates to the diet in 1487, but the restless knights and some of the other minor nobles had no part in the deliberations and did not always feel that the decisions of the assembly were binding upon them. Of the diets which met almost every year during the Lutheran period in some one of the great German cities, we shall hear more later.

135. It is natural that Protestant and Catholic writers should differ in their views of Germany at this period. Among Protestants there has always been a tendency to see the dark side of affairs, for this exalted the work of Luther and made him appear the savior of his people. On the other hand, the Catholic historians have devoted years of research to an attempt to prove that conditions were, on the whole, happy and serene and full of hope for the future before Luther and the other revolutionary leaders brought division and ruin upon the fatherland by attacking the Church.

As a matter of fact, the life and thought of Germany during the fifty years preceding the opening of the Protestant revolt present all sorts of contradictions and anomalies. The period was one of marked progress. The people were eager to learn, and they rejoiced in the recent invention of printing which brought them the new learning from Italy and hints of another world beyond the seas. Foreigners who visited Germany were astonished at the prosperity, wealth, and luxury of the rich merchants, who often spent their money in the encouragement of art and literature and in the founding of schools and libraries.

On the other hand, there was great ill feeling between the various classes the petty princes, the townspeople, the knights, and the peasants. It was generally believed by the other classes that the wealth of the merchants could only be accounted for by deceit, usury, and sharp dealing. Never was begging more prevalent, superstition more rife, vulgarity and coarseness more apparent. Attempts to reform the government and stop neighborhood war met with little success. Moreover, the Turks were advancing steadily upon Christendom. The people were commanded by the pope to send up a prayer each day as the noon bell rang, that God might deliver them from the on-coming infidel.

Yet we need not be astonished by these contradictions, for history teaches that all periods of progress are full of them. Any newspaper will show how true this is to-day: we are, as a nation, good and bad, rich and poor, peaceful and warlike, learned and ignorant, satisfied and discontented, civilized and barbarous, all at once.

In considering the condition of the Church and of religion in Germany, four things are particularly important as explaining the origin and character of the Protestant revolt. First, there was an extraordinary enthusiasm for all the pomp and ceremony of the old religion, and a great confidence in pilgrimages, relics, miracles, and all those things which the Protestants were soon to discard. Secondly, there was a tendency to read the Bible and to dwell upon the attitude of the sinner toward God, rather than upon the external acts of religion. Thirdly, there was a conviction, especially among scholars, that the theologians had made religion needlessly complicated with their fine-spun logical distinctions. And lastly, there was the old and very general belief that the Italian prelates, including the pope, were always inventing new plans for getting money out of the Germans, whom they regarded as a stupid people, easily hoodwinked. These four matters we shall consider in turn.

136. Never had the many ceremonies and observances of the mediaeval Church attracted more attention or been carried out on a more prodigious scale than during the latter part of the fifteenth, and the opening years of the sixteenth century. It seemed as if all Germany agreed to join in one last celebration of the old religion, unprecedented in magnificence, before its people parted into two irreconcilable parties. Great numbers of new churches were erected, and adorned with the richest productions of German art. Tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked to the various sacred places, and gorgeous ecclesiastical processions moved through the streets of the prosperous imperial towns.

The princes rivaled each other in collecting the relics of saints, which were venerated as an aid to salvation. The elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, who was later to become Luther’s protector, had accumulated no less than five thousand of these sacred objects. In a catalogue of them we find the rod of Moses, a bit of the burning bush, thread spun by the Virgin, etc. The elector of Mayence possessed even a larger collection, which included forty-two whole bodies of saints and some of the earth from a field near Damascus out of which God was supposed to have created man.

It was the teaching of the Church that prayers, fasts, masses, pilgrimages, and other “good works” might be accumulated and form a treasury of spiritual goods. Those who were wanting in good deeds might, therefore, have their deficiencies offset by the inexhaustible surplus of righteous deeds which had been created by Christ and the saints.

The idea was certainly a beautiful one, that Christians should thus be able to help one another by their good works, and that the strong and faithful worshiper could aid the weak and indifferent. Yet the thoughtful teachers in the Church realized that the doctrine of the treasury of good works might be gravely misunderstood; and there was certainly a strong inclination among the people to believe that God might be propitiated by various outward acts attendance at church ceremonies, giving of alms, the veneration of relics, the making of pilgrimages, etc. It was clear that the hope of profiting by the good works of others might lead to the neglect of the true welfare of the soul.

137. In spite, however, of the popular confidence in outward acts and ceremonies, from which the heart was often absent, there were many signs of a general longing for deeper and more spiritual religion than that of which we have been speaking. The new art of printing was used to increase the number of religious manuals. These all emphasized the uselessness of outward acts without true contrition and sorrow for sin, and urged the sinner to rely upon the love and forgiveness of God.

All good Christians were urged, moreover, to read the Bible, of which there were a number of editions in German, besides little books in which portions of the New Testament were given. There are many indications that the Bible was commonly read before Luther’s time.

It was natural, therefore, that the German people should take a great interest in the new and better translation of the Scriptures which Luther prepared. Preaching had also become common as common perhaps as it is now before the Protestants appeared. Some towns even engaged special preachers of known eloquence to address their citizens regularly.

These facts would seem to justify the conclusion that there were many before Luther appeared who were approaching the ideas of religion which later appealed especially to the Protestants. The insistence of the Protestants upon salvation through faith alone in God, their suspicion of ceremonies and “good works,” their reliance upon the Bible, and the stress they laid upon preaching, all these were to be found in Germany and elsewhere before Luther began to preach.

138. Among the critics of the churchmen, monks, and theologians, none were more conspicuous than the humanists. The Renaissance in Italy, which may be said to have begun with Petrarch and his library, has already been described. The Petrarch of Germany was Rudolph Agricola, who, while not absolutely the first German to dedicate himself to classical studies, was the first who by his charming personality and varied accomplishments stimulated others, as Petrarch had done, to carry on the pursuits which he himself so much enjoyed. Unlike most of the Italian humanists, however, Agricola and his followers were interested in the language of the people as well as in Latin and Greek; and proposed that the works of antiquity should be translated into German. Moreover, the German humanists were generally far more serious and devout than the Italian scholars.

As the humanists increased in numbers and confidence they began to criticise the excessive attention given in the German universities to logic and the scholastic theology. These studies had lost their earlier vitality and had degenerated into fruitless disputations. The bad Latin which the professors used themselves and taught their students, and the preference still given to Aristotle over all other ancient writers, disgusted the humanists. They therefore undertook to prepare new and better text-books, and proposed that the study of the Greek and Roman poets and orators should be introduced into the schools and colleges. Some of the classical scholars were for doing away with theology altogether, as a vain, monkish study which only obscured the great truths of religion. The old-fashioned professors, on their part, naturally denounced the new learning, which they declared made pagans of those who became enamored of it. Sometimes the humanists were permitted to teach their favorite subjects in the universities, but as time went on it became clear that the old and the new teachers could not work amicably side by side.

At last, a little before Luther’s public appearance, a conflict occurred between the “poets,” as the humanists were fond of calling themselves, and the “barbarians,” as they called the theologians and monkish writers. An eminent Hebrew scholar, Reuchlin, had become involved in a bitter controversy with the Dominican professors of the University of Cologne. His cause was championed by the humanists, who prepared an extraordinary satire upon their opponents. They wrote a series of letters, which were addressed to one of the Cologne professors and purported to be from his former students and admirers. In these letters the writers take pains to exhibit the most shocking ignorance and stupidity. They narrate their scandalous doings with the ostensible purpose of obtaining advice as to the best way to get out of their scrapes. They vituperate the humanists in comically bad Latin, which is perhaps the best part of the joke. In this way those who later opposed Luther and his reforms were held up to ridicule in these letters and their opposition to progress seemed clearly made out.

139. The acknowledged prince of the humanists was Erasmus. No other man of letters, unless it be Voltaire, has ever enjoyed such a European reputation during his lifetime. He was venerated by scholars far and wide, even in Spain and Italy. Although he was born in Rotterdam he was not a Dutchman, but a citizen of the world; he is, in fact, claimed by England, France, and Germany. He lived in each of these countries for a considerable period and in each he left his mark on the thought of the time. Erasmus, like most of the northern humanists, was deeply interested in religious reform, and he aspired to give the world a higher conception of religion and the Church than that which generally prevailed. He clearly perceived, as did all the other intelligent people of the time, the vices of the prelates, priests, and especially of the monks. Against the latter he had a personal grudge, for he had been forced into a monastery when he was a boy, and always looked back to the life there with disgust. Erasmus reached the height of his fame just before the public appearance of Luther; consequently his writings afford an admirable means of determining how he and his innumerable admirers felt about the Church and the clergy before the opening of the great revolt.

Erasmus spent some time in England between the years 1498 and 1506, and made friends of the scholars there. He was especially fond of Sir Thomas More, who wrote the famous Utopia, and of a young man, John Colet, who was lecturing at Oxford upon the Epistles of St. Paul. Colet’s enthusiasm for Paul appears to have led Erasmus to direct his vast knowledge of the ancient languages to the explanation of the New Testament. This was only known in the common Latin version (the Vulgate), into which many mistakes and misapprehensions had crept. Erasmus felt that the first thing to do, in order to promote higher ideas of Christianity, was to purify the sources of the faith by preparing a correct edition of the New Testament. Accordingly, in 1516, he published the original Greek text with a new Latin translation and explanations which mercilessly exposed the mistakes of the great body of theologians.

Erasmus would have had the Bible in the hands of every one. In the introduction to his edition of the New Testament he says that women should read the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul as well as the men. The peasant in the field, the artisan in his shop, and the traveler on the highroad should while away the time with passages from the Bible.

Erasmus believed that the two arch enemies of true religion were (1) paganism, into which many of the more enthusiastic Italian humanists fell in their admiration for the ancient literatures, and (2) the popular confidence in mere outward acts and ceremonies, like visiting the graves of saints, the mechanical repetition of prayers, and so forth. He claimed that the Church had become careless and had permitted the simple teachings of Christ to be buried under myriads of dogmas introduced by the theologians. “The essence of our religion,” he says, “is peace and harmony. These can only exist where there are few dogmas and each individual is left to form his own opinion upon many matters.”

In his celebrated Praise of Folly, Erasmus has much to say of the weaknesses of the monks and theologians, and of the foolish people who thought that religion consisted simply in pilgrimages, the worship of relics, and the procuring of indulgences. Scarcely one of the abuses which Luther later attacked escaped Erasmus’ satirical pen. The book is a mixture of the lightest humor and the bitterest earnestness. As one turns its pages one is sometimes tempted to think Luther half right when he declared Erasmus “a regular jester who makes sport of everything, even of religion and Christ himself.” Yet there was in this humorist a deep seriousness that cannot be ignored. Erasmus was really directing his extraordinary industry, knowledge, and insight, not toward a revival of classical literature, but to a renaissance of Christianity. He believed, however, that revolt from the pope and the Church would produce a great disturbance and result in more harm than good. He preferred to trust in the slower but surer effects of enlightenment and knowledge. Popular superstitions and any undue regard for the outward forms of religion would, he argued, be outgrown and quietly disappear as mankind became more cultivated.

To Erasmus and his many sympathizers, culture, promoted especially by classical studies, should be the chief agency in religious reform. Nevertheless, just as Erasmus thought that his dreams of a peaceful reform were to be realized, as he saw the friends and patrons of literature, Maximilian, Henry VIII, Francis I, on the thrones of Europe, and a humanist pope, Leo X, at the head of the Church, a very different revolution from that which he had planned, had begun and was to embitter his declining years.

140. The grudge of Germany against the papal court never found a more eloquent expression than in the verses of its greatest minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide. Three hundred years before Luther’s time he declared that the pope was making merry over the stupid Germans. “All their goods will be mine, their silver is flowing into my far-away chest; their priests are living on poultry and wine and leaving the silly layman to fast.” Similar sentiments may be found in the German writers of all the following generations. Every one of the sources of discontent with the financial administration of the Church which the councils had tried to correct was particularly apparent in Germany. The great German prelates, like the archbishops of Mayence, Treves, Cologne, and Salzburg, were each required to contribute no less than ten thousand gold guldens to the papal treasury upon having their election duly confirmed by the pope; and many thousands more were expected from them when they received the pallium. The pope enjoyed the right to fill many important bénéfices in Germany, and frequently appointed Italians, who drew the revenue without dreaming of performing any of the duties attached to the office. A single person frequently held several church offices. For example, early in the sixteenth century, the Archbishop of Mayence was at the same time Archbishop of Magdeburg and Bishop of Halberstadt. In some instances a single person had accumulated over a score of bénéfices.

It is impossible to exaggerate the impression of deep and widespread discontent with the condition of the Church which one meets in the writings of the early sixteenth century. The whole German people, from the rulers down to the humblest tiller of the fields, felt themselves unjustly used. The clergy were denounced as both immoral and inefficient. One devout writer exclaims that young men are considered quite good enough to be priests to whom one would not intrust the care of a cow. While the begging friars the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians were scorned by many, they, rather than the secular clergy, appear to have carried on the real religious work. It was an Augustinian monk, we shall find, who preached the new gospel of justification by faith.

Very few indeed thought of withdrawing from the Church or of attempting to destroy the power of the pope. All that most of the Germans wished was that the money which, on one pretense or another, flowed toward Rome should be kept at home, and that the clergy should be upright, earnest men who should conscientiously perform their religious duties. One patriotic writer, however, Ulrich von Hutten, was preaching something very like revolution at the same time that Luther began his attack on the pope.

Hutten was the son of a poor knight, but early tired of the monotonous life of the castle and determined to seek the universities and acquaint himself with the ancient literatures, of which so much was being said. In order to carry on his studies he visited Italy and there formed a most unfavorable impression of the papal court and of the Italian churchmen, whom he believed to be oppressing his beloved fatherland. When the Letters of Obscure Men appeared, he was so delighted with them that he prepared a supplementary series in which he freely satirized the theologians. Soon he began to write in German as well as in Latin, in order the more readily to reach the ears of the people. In one of his pamphlets attacking the popes he explains that he has himself seen how Leo X spends the money which the Germans send him. A part goes to his relatives, a part to maintain the luxurious papal court, and a part to worthless companions and attendants, whose lives would shock any honest Christian.

In Germany, of all the countries of Europe, conditions were such that Luther’s appearance wrought like an electric shock throughout the nation, leaving no class unaffected. Throughout the land there was discontent and a yearning for betterment. Very various, to be sure, were the particular longings of the prince and the scholar, of knight, burgher, and peasant; but almost all were ready to consider, at least, the teachings of one who presented to them a new conception of salvation which made the old Church superfluous.