Oswald Spengler. Le Déclin de l'Occident. Esquisse d'une morphologie de l'histoire universelle. (Première parution en 1931),Trad. de l'allemand par M. Tazerout Édition en deux volumes (01-10-1948) --- (or Gutenberg project The Decline of the West)

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The Hussites

A century after the Northern Crusades, the Empire engaged in a final, internal crusade, against Bohemian Hussitism, the most important heretical movement prior to the Reformation, as well as the largest popular rising prior to the Peasants War of 1524–6. The late medieval concern for individual belief intersected with the growth of written culture to make heresy easier to identify as deviance from approved texts and practices. The Hussites took inspiration from Jan Hus, the rector of Prague University who was treacherously burned at the stake in 1415 after the Luxembourg monarch Sigismund reneged on a promised safe conduct to present Hus’s case at the Council of Constance (1414–18). Although the Hussites established their own national church in 1417, their movement soon split into millennialist Taborites, operating from the town of Tabor, and moderate Utraquists, named after their practice of communion ‘in both kinds’ (sub utraque specie), bread and wine. Opposition to Sigismund’s accession as Bohemian king in 1419 briefly reunited the factions and led to their conquest of most of the kingdom.

Sigismund received papal indulgences for five major expeditions between 1420 and 1431. Most crusaders came from Germany, Holland and Hungary (where Sigismund was also king), despite the appeal being directed throughout Christendom. A 3,000-strong English detachment arrived on the continent in 1427, but they were redirected to fight Jeanne d’Arc in the Hundred Years War – a further indication of the manipulation of indulgences to advance secular goals. The imperial counter-attacks were repulsed by the Hussites’ determination and superior tactics, but also because the emperor was simultaneously engaged in defending Hungary against renewed Turkish invasion.

Eventually, the situation was defused through the Compacta of 1436 between the Bohemian Catholic elite and the Utraquists, who formed the majority of the population. Utraquist practices were tolerated in return for their formal submission to Rome. The defeat was greater for the papacy than for the Empire. For the first time, the pope had allowed heretics to present their case and made significant concessions. Sigismund’s rule was secure in Bohemia, while the episode provided a significant boost to constitutional reform, eventually giving the Empire its definitive shape around 1500. Bohemia remained within the Empire despite its distinctive religious arrangements and even the accession of an openly Utraquist king, George Podibrad, in 1458.64

THE EMPEROR AS JEWISH ADVOCATE

The Jews and the Empire

The story of the Jews in the Empire is much like imperial history generally: far from perfect, occasionally tragic, but generally more benign than that of other places or times. Although marginalized in most accounts, their history reveals much about the Empire’s social and political order. Charlemagne revived late Roman imperial patronage of the Jews, who had retained legal recognition in most of the Germanic successor kingdoms since the fall of western Rome in the late fifth century. Jews made significant contributions to Carolingian artistic and commercial development, particularly through their roles as intermediaries in selling captive Slavs as slave soldiers to Iberian Muslim armies. There were around 20,000 Ashkenazi Jews in the Empire north of the Alps in 1000, mainly in Mainz, Worms and other Rhenish episcopal towns.65

The Carolingian and Ottonian elite remained ambivalent, conscious that Jews and Christians shared the Old Testament, yet only Jews could read the original Hebrew text.66 Imperial protection was inconsistent. Otto II often assigned powers over Jews to bishops as part of broader privileges intended to boost the development of cathedral towns. Adverse circumstances could prompt punitive measures against Jews, notably under Henry II, who was decidedly less tolerant. Two thousand Jews were expelled from Mainz in 1012, though the decree was revoked the following year.67

The most significant step came in 1090 when Henry IV issued a general privilege to Jews modelled on those granted to individuals by Louis II over two centuries earlier. Probably prompted by the significant growth in the Jewish population in Worms and Speyer, Henry assumed the position of Advocatis Imperatoris Judaica, or general protector of all Jews in the Empire. This established arrangements that persisted until the Empire’s demise in 1806. The safeguarding of Jewish economic, legal and religious rights was reserved as an imperial prerogative, linking imperial prestige to effective protection. Like other arrangements in the Empire, implementation varied according to circumstances, while protection rights were often devolved along with other privileges to more local figures. Enforcement became less consistent, but over time Jewish privileges were woven into the general web of imperial law, affording Jews by early modernity a surprising degree of autonomous protection.

Pre-modern toleration should not be confused with modern multiculturalism, equality, and the celebration of diversity as intrinsically good. Jews remained protected provided they accepted their second-class status. Diversity was feared, but also recognized as beneficial. Jews had a specific socio-economic role, assuming tasks that Christians were unwilling or unable to perform. Jews also played a cultural part as ‘the other’ reinforcing Christian group identity – often at considerable cost to themselves.

Pogroms and Extortion

Imperial protection of the Jews foundered almost immediately when Henry IV was trapped by his enemies in northern Italy and unable to prevent the first serious pogrom in German history in 1096. Proclamation of the First Crusade in November 1095 coincided with widespread suffering from flooding and famine. French preachers spread the standard accusations of Jews as usurers and ‘Christ killers’, calling on the crusaders to eradicate them as they marched to the Holy Land. Already licensed to kill by papal indulgences, the crusading army wreaked havoc as it moved east from Rouen into the Empire, where it was joined by impoverished German knights who saw a chance for plunder. Jews were told to convert or die, with many choosing suicide as the crusaders marched up the Rhine. Only the pro-imperial bishop Johannes of Speyer used force to uphold imperial protection. Once he managed to escape to Germany in 1097, Henry blamed Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz for the pogrom. Jews who had been forcibly converted were allowed to return to Judaism, despite Ruthard’s protests. Imperial protection was renewed and incorporated in the general public peace declared for the Empire in 1103.68

Frederick Barbarossa acted swiftly to prevent a repeat of the pogrom when 10,000 gathered in Mainz to take the cross for the Third Crusade in March 1188. He publicly praised loyal Jews, and when a mob threatened violence against them, the imperial marshal, ‘taking his servants with him and his staff in his hand … smote and wounded them, until they all dispersed’.69

Frederick II made an important adjustment when he renewed Henry IV’s legislation in 1234. As with many of Frederick’s actions, this was not as progressive as it first appears. The emperor vigorously rejected the myth of Jews committing ritual child murder, which so often provided an excuse for pogroms. Christians killed 30 Jews in Fulda after five Christian children died in a house fire at Christmas 1235. The case was considered sufficiently serious to be transferred to Frederick’s own royal tribunal, which publicly rejected the excuse of ritual murder and renewed imperial protection for all Jews early the next year. Frederick’s legislation inspired similar measures in Hungary (1251), Bohemia (1254) and Poland (1264). Unfortunately, it also incorporated Pope Innocent III’s transfer of religious animosity to secular law promulgated a few decades earlier. Arguing that Jews inherited the guilt of Christ’s death, Innocent had imposed permanent servitude as a punishment. This aspect was expressed in Frederick’s verdict in 1236, which subordinated the Empire’s Jews as ‘servants of the chamber’ (Kammerknechte).70 Protection was now dependent on payment of an annual tax, known since 1324 as the ‘Sacrificial Penny’, levied on all Jews older than 12. An additional ‘crown tax’ was payable on the accession of each new king.

Imperial protection for Jews remained patchy. Three-quarters of Frankfurt’s 200-strong Jewish community died in a pogrom in 1241, while Jews joined other migrants heading east in search of a better life. Nonetheless, the situation was probably similar to that in Spain and compared favourably to England or France.71 More significantly, this persisted despite weaker royal power after 1250, providing a further indication that ‘decentralization’ should not be misconstrued as ‘decline’ in the Empire’s history. Later thirteenth-century kings sold or devolved to lords those rights to protect Jews as part of a wider strategy to buy support. Consequently, both the number of Jewish communities and their lordly protectors multiplied so that there were 350 communities across Germany by the mid-fourteenth century.

This did not immediately strengthen protection for the Jews, since overall responsibility remained with the monarch, who could switch track, as Charles IV demonstrated with fatal results. Charles assumed power in the middle of a civil war in 1346. The papal interdict against his predecessor, Louis IV, had left large parts of the Empire without Christian services by 1338, stoking anxiety that deepened dramatically with the Black Death a decade later. Charles crudely exploited his prerogatives to win support by encouraging pogroms, even offering immunity in return for a share in the spoils. Six hundred Jews died in Nuremberg, where the Marienkirche was built on the ruins of their synagogue, while only around 50 communities across the Empire survived, largely by paying huge ransoms.72 The privilege of protecting Jews (Judenregal) was included in the wider bundle of rights granted to the electors in the Golden Bull cementing the new alliance between Charles and the Empire’s political elite in 1356. His son and successor Wenzel repeated this shameful extortion, receiving 40,000 florins from the Swabian cities in return for allowing them to plunder their Jewish populations in June 1385, and he did this again five years later in alliance with several princes. Meanwhile, Jews faced growing discrimination, including exclusion from long-distance trade. Again, much of this was fuelled by the Empire’s elite, who were imposing heavier taxes on Jews, who were then obliged to pass increased costs on to their Christian customers by charging higher interest on loans.73

Early Modern Protection

Nonetheless, in the longer term the devolution of protection for Jews blunted this abuse of power by widening the circle of those with a vested interest in better relations. Throughout the bad times of the fourteenth century, individual lords and imperial cities preferred peaceful coexistence. Regensburg and Ulm refused to cooperate with Charles’s measures, and while Frankfurt expelled its Jews in 1349, it allowed them to return in 1360. The community thrived, doubling across the late fifteenth century to total 250 by 1522, and then rising rapidly, reaching 3,000 or 11 per cent of all inhabitants by 1610.74 The Habsburg Albert II was the last monarch to attempt extortion and, significantly, this failed to raise much money, despite the richer and larger Jewish population.75

His successor, Frederick III, reactivated imperial protection by claiming all Jews were his immediate subjects. Frederick too hoped to raise money, but this time through the regular Sacrificial Penny, and he vigorously resisted calls from Christians to reinstitute extortion. He was criticized as too soft, and mocked as ‘king of the Jews’.76 More positive attitudes were emerging around the time of Frederick’s death in 1493. Humanists and early Protestant reformers were interested in Hebrew as a means to understand Christianity’s origins. Sebastian Münster’s book Hebraica sold 100,000 copies, making it one of the world’s first best-sellers. The personally anti-Semitic Maximilian I, Frederick’s successor, was dissuaded from renewing persecution by the Humanist Johannes Reuchlin, who argued in 1511 that Jews had been Roman citizens since late antiquity.

Rapid socio-economic change, passions stirred by the Reformation, and the reformers’ disappointment at failing to convert Jews to Protestantism all contributed to a more threatening atmosphere around 1530. Jews were expelled from at least 13 Protestant and Catholic territories and cities between 1519 and 1614, reducing their main communities to Frankfurt, Friedberg, Worms, Speyer, Vienna, Prague and Fulda abbey. Anti-Semitism remained a depressing feature of rural as well as urban protest throughout early modernity. However, the continued grant of Jewish protection rights to princes created new communities in Fürth, Minden, Hildesheim, Essen, Altona, Crailsheim and the duchy of Westphalia from the 1570s. Others, like Ansbach, readmitted communities they had previously expelled. The new pattern of protection again changed the character of Jewish settlement, which now spread into the countryside from imperial cities and princely residence towns. Meanwhile, refugees from the Dutch Revolt founded the Empire’s first Sephardic community in Hamburg during the 1580s.

Jews and Imperial Law

Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612) was genuinely interested in Jewish culture and banned Luther’s anti-Semitic books.77 However, the Empire’s development as a mixed monarchy proved a far more significant factor in the improving conditions. Unlike in centralized monarchies, toleration no longer depended on the whim of individual monarchs. Devolution of protection for Jews embedded responsibility within the general web of privileges and rights enshrined in imperial law. Imperial protection was renewed five times between 1530 and 1551, and became part of the general legislation passed by all imperial Estates through the Reichstag, linking the integrity and prestige of all political authorities to ensuring observance. The 1530 law did oblige all Jews to wear a yellow star. This was widely ignored and then formally overturned by the Reichstag in 1544. All forms of harassment were now prohibited. Jews were guaranteed free mobility, protection for their property and synagogues and against forced conversion, and were permitted to charge higher interest rates than Christians. Jewish self-government also secured legal recognition.78

Local authorities had to obtain permission from higher sources before expelling a Jewish community. Individual Jews remained subject to numerous restrictions, such as denial of full citizenship in cities, but could own property, including weapons, and could participate in wider aspects of the Empire, including using the imperial postal service. Imperial criminal justice remained neutral towards religion. Prejudice certainly affected judgements, but the new imperial supreme courts created in the 1490s were concerned with adhering to formal procedures. For instance, Jewish prisoners could observe religious rituals, even where they had not requested this.79

Like peasants and other socially disadvantaged groups, Jews were able to make effective use of imperial laws to defend their rights after 1530. For example, Emperor Ferdinand I’s own supreme tribunal (the Reichshofrat) disregarded his anti-Semitism and upheld an appeal from the Jewish community in Worms against the city council’s decision to expel them.80 Such cases have wider significance, because the Empire’s judicial system is widely perceived as deficient thanks to a systematic late sixteenth-century campaign by Protestant zealots to discredit their Catholic opponents, much of which was accepted as fact by later historians. Precisely when some Protestant princes were complaining loudly at religious bias, Jewish communities were quietly and effectively obtaining legal protection against princely and civic persecution.81

This is best demonstrated by the notorious Fettmilch incident, the worst anti-Semitic outburst between the mid-fourteenth century and the 1930s.82 Frankfurt’s Jewish community became the scapegoats for wider problems in the city around 1600, including rising taxation, falling wages, and an increasingly oligarchical government perceived as out of touch with ordinary inhabitants. The artisan leader Vincenz Fettmilch accused Jews and patricians of exploiting the poor, inciting a mob that attacked both the city hall and the ghetto where the city’s Jews had lived since 1462, murdering 262 and plundering property worth 176,000 florins in 1612. Violence spread to Worms, where Jews were expelled. Although the outbreak had not been prevented, punishment was swift and effective. Fettmilch and six associates were executed, while legal injunctions prevented other cities from expelling their communities. Worms was forced to readmit its Jews in 1617. Overall, Jews brought 1,021 cases to the Empire’s supreme court (the Reichskammergericht), representing 1.3 per cent of its entire case load between 1495 and 1806, though they only numbered 0.5 per cent of the Empire’s population. Meanwhile, they were also involved in 1,200 cases before the Reichshofrat between 1559 and 1670, or 3 per cent of that court’s business.83

The Persistence of Established Structures

Protection for the Jews continued despite the upheavals of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), while the surge in violent anti-Semitism accompanying the hyper-inflation of 1621–3 did not see a repeat of the earlier pogroms. The immediate post-war decades after 1648 saw a renewed wave of expulsions, with Jews driven from ten territories and cities, including Vienna, but these were more limited than those of the sixteenth century, while many authorities now actively encouraged Jewish immigration to help repopulate their lands. Already in 1675, 250 families were allowed to return to Vienna, while that year Duisburg University admitted its first Jewish students, far ahead of institutions elsewhere in Europe.84 Territorial governments observed their legal obligations, even though they no longer derived significant financial benefit. Only Frankfurt’s Jews still paid the Sacrificial Penny in the eighteenth century, which brought the emperor a mere 3,000 florins annually, while Jewish taxes in Münster accounted for just 0.1 per cent of the bishopric’s revenue.85

The Jewish population grew faster than that of the Empire overall, rising from under 40,000 in 1600 to 60,000 by the later seventeenth century, with an additional 50,000 in Bohemia and Moravia. Although main centres were still urban, notably Frankfurt and Prague, nine out of ten Jews now lived in the countryside, either in the 30 principalities with communities or amongst the 20,000 living on the lands of the imperial knights by the late eighteenth century. The knights saw Jewish protection as a way of asserting their otherwise vulnerable autonomy. The Jewish population continued to grow faster than that of Christians, totalling 250,000 by 1800, with a further 150,000 in the lands recently annexed by Austria and Prussia from Poland.86

Economic arguments and liberal ideas associated with the Enlightenment are usually used to explain the improving conditions leading to nineteenth-century emancipation. This links the standard narrative of progress to the centralized state, exemplified in central Europe by Prussia and Austria. Both these lands were largely outside the web of imperial laws by the late eighteenth century, so we would expect the position of Jews there to be better than in the more politically fragmented areas of the Empire. This was not the case. The situation in the Habsburg monarchy was not always favourable prior to the 1781 toleration edict, and in 1745 the Ottoman sultan lodged a formal protest at Empress Maria Theresa’s treatment of the Bohemian Jews.87 Frederick William I forced Prussia’s Jews to pay a new tax in 1714 in return for dropping requirements to make them wear a distinctive red hat. The Berlin court printer circumvented the imperial censor to publish Johannes Andreas Eisenmenger’s Jewishness Revealed, the first modern anti-Semitic book that was banned in the Empire, but it now appeared from a press supposedly based in the Prussian town of Königsberg beyond the imperial frontier. The brilliant Jewish intellectual, Moses Mendelssohn, visiting Berlin in 1776, was made to pay a head tax fixed at the rate levied on cattle passing the main city gate in a deliberate effort to ridicule him. His treatment reveals the hollowness of Frederick II of Prussia’s much-celebrated toleration.88

Legal protection for Jews could still fail elsewhere in the Empire, as exemplified by the notorious show trial and execution of the financier Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who was made the scapegoat for discredited government policies in Württemberg in 1738.89 However, the authorities had a vested interest in upholding protection, since their own privileges and status were at risk if they failed to do so.90 The contrast with other parts of Europe is perhaps best illustrated by one final case. Prince de Rohan fled revolution in his homeland of France by moving to his German properties at Ettenheim in 1790, where he evicted several Jewish families to make room for his courtiers. The families promptly obtained redress from the Reichskammergericht.91

REFORMATIONS

The Reformation in the Context of Imperial History

The Jews formed the Empire’s only religious minority between the decline of paganism amongst the Slavic populations around 1200 and the emergence of Hussitism over two centuries later. The most significant challenge to conformity came with the Reformation after 1517.92 The Reformation’s uneven outcome reinforced the political and cultural distinctions between the Empire’s primary territorial components, including the drift of Switzerland and the Netherlands towards independence.

The causes of this cultural earthquake lie beyond this book’s scope, but we need to note the context in which it emerged, since this explains why the new religious controversy differed from those of the medieval Empire. Papal concordats with individual monarchs since the early twelfth century fostered the growth of more distinct national churches across much of Europe. This process accelerated rapidly around 1450 and contributed to Charles V’s inability during the 1520s to repeat Sigismund’s success at the Council of Constance by addressing the Reformation through a single church council under his leadership. Meanwhile, the Empire was also changing rapidly through the institutional changes collectively labelled ‘imperial reform’ around 1500 (see pp. 398–406). Crucially, these changes were incomplete by 1517, ensuring that resolution of the crisis became enmeshed with constitutional developments.

The context also contributed to Luther’s failure to restore what he regarded as the original ‘pure’ Christianity by elevating Scripture to the sole basis of truth. The relative decline in papal and imperial authority meant there was now no single authority to judge his beliefs, which were as a result accepted, rejected or adapted by a host of national and local communities. Religious issues affected broad aspects of daily life, as well as personal salvation, adding to the urgency of their resolution. Attempts to defuse controversy by clarifying doctrine proved counter-productive, since fixing arguments in writing simply made the disagreements more obvious. Moreover, the new print media ensured rapid dissemination of the diverging views, igniting arguments across Europe.93 Once the initial splits had occurred, it became harder for those involved to repair them.

The Problem of Authority

The failure of clerical leadership prompted theologians and laity to call on the secular authorities for protection and support. Religious issues became impossible to disentangle from political questions as political backing for Luther expanded the evangelical movement from simply protesting within the Roman church to creating a rival structure. The real question by 1530 was one of authority. It was not clear who among the emperor, princes, magistrates or people was entitled to decide which version of Christianity was correct. Nor was it clear how to resolve who owned church property or how to deal with dissent.

Some reformers like Caspar Schwenckfeld and Melchior Hoffmann rejected virtually all established authority, while a few like Thomas Müntzer envisaged a communistic godly society. Such radicalism was discredited by the violence accompanying the Knights Revolt (1522–3) and Peasants War (1524–6) (see pp. 557–8 and 591–3). Regardless of belief, the Empire’s authorities had closed ranks to exclude common folk from these decisions by 1526. However, evangelicals continued to elaborate theological arguments to resist those who opposed their goals, by claiming that duty to God trumped political obedience.94 Unfortunately, even they disagreed about who possessed such rights of resistance. While most restricted such resistance to ‘godly magistrates’, it was far from clear who these were given the Empire’s multiple layers of authority.

Luther’s protest came at entirely the wrong time for the ageing emperor Maximilian I, who was in the middle of brokering the election of his grandson, Charles, king of Spain, as his successor. The pressure of other events ensured that nearly two years elapsed between Charles’s election as emperor in 1519 and his arrival in the Empire to open his first Reichstag at Worms in April 1521. The delay fuelled not only mounting (and unrealistic) expectations, but also frustration at the pace of constitutional reform. The decisions over the next three years proved decisive in determining how religion affected later imperial politics.95 Luther’s refusal to recant at Worms prompted Charles to impose the imperial ban, effectively criminalizing the evangelicals as outlaws who threatened the Empire’s internal ‘public peace’. Under the judicial system developed since 1495, all imperial Estates were supposed to enforce this decision, but Charles acted more honourably than Sigismund had behaved towards Jan Hus. Having allowed Luther to enter Worms under safe conduct, Charles permitted him to leave unmolested. The elector of Saxony, who sympathized with Luther, then arranged to have him hidden in Wartburg castle, where he stayed for ten months while others spread his message largely unchecked.

Having sought to detach theological issues from public order, Charles issued the Edict of Burgos on 15 July 1524, expressly rejecting calls to hold a national council to debate church reform. This completed his attempt to separate religion and politics along the traditional lines expressed by the Two Swords doctrine: the pope was to decide what constituted the correct version of Christianity, while Charles as emperor would enforce this using the Empire’s legal machinery to crush dissent as a public-order issue.

A Lost Opportunity?

The controversy surrounding the decisions of 1521–4 persisted into the nineteenth century. Protestant German nationalists condemned what they regarded as a lost opportunity to embrace their faith as a truly ‘German’ religion, thereby forging the Empire as a nation state.96 This ‘failure’ was often woven into explanations of later German woes: the country was supposedly left divided, hindering unification under Bismarck, who regarded Catholics as disloyal after 1871, because of their continued religious allegiance to Rome. These charges rest on a partisan, Protestant reading of history and the self-identification of that faith as inherently ‘German’, as well as a gross oversimplification of the situation facing people in the sixteenth-century Empire – that is, a supposedly simple choice between Catholicism and Protestantism. The vast majority hoped the controversy could be resolved without shattering Christian unity. Wholehearted support for Luther made little political sense for Charles V, regardless of his own fairly conservative views on faith. Ruling the birthplace of the Reformation, Charles confronted evangelism when it appeared indelibly associated with political subversion and challenges to the socio-economic order, and before it had acquired the theological and institutional footing making it acceptable later in other countries such as England. Charles’s imperial title was tied to a universal, not a national, church, and it remained inconceivable, both to himself and to many of his subjects, that he should not follow the same faith as the pope.97

These considerations help explain why the Empire did not adopt what became the general western European solution to the religious controversy of imposing a monarchical civil peace. This entailed the ruler deciding on a single official faith enshrined in a written statement prepared by his theologians (as, for example, in England), or through publicly defending Catholicism. Regardless of the precise theology, this produced a ‘confessional state’ with a single, established church allied institutionally and politically to the crown.98 Toleration of dissenters was a matter of political expediency, granted when the monarchy was weak, as in the case of late sixteenth-century France, or where the official church remained opposed by a significant minority, as in England. Either way, dissenters depended on special royal dispensations which could be curtailed, or revoked, unilaterally, as the French Huguenots discovered in 1685. Toleration might be widened incrementally through further dispensations, like the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) in Britain, but a privileged, established church remained. Few countries have ever gone as far as the French Republic, which separated church and state in 1905, establishing a modern, secular peace treating all faiths equally provided their followers do not transgress state laws.

Secularization

Rather than imposing a solution by fiat from above, the Empire negotiated its solution collectively through the new constitutional structures emerging from imperial reform. Unity rested on consensus, not central power, and the result was religious and legal pluralism, not orthodoxy and a disadvantaged or persecuted minority. This outcome emerged from fierce and sometimes violent disputes over constitutional rights rather than through ecumenical compromise.

Once all parties had agreed by 1526 that matters should be settled by the ‘proper authorities’ rather than the ‘common man’, two core issues remained. One involved the question of spiritual jurisdiction, since this determined the authority to direct the religious belief and practices of ordinary folk in specific areas. The other concerned the management of clergy and church assets like buildings, property and revenue streams. These had always been important issues in imperial history. The Ottonians had already revoked donations and transferred land to secular lords. This process accelerated after 1100 as the emperor needed more resources to compensate nobles for their military expenses. Meanwhile, secular lords curtailed or usurped the secular jurisdictions of their ecclesiastical neighbours, removing them as imperial Estates, but not as functioning Catholic institutions. This continued beyond the Reformation as the archbishop of Salzburg incorporated the possessions of the bishops of Gurk, Seckau and Lavant. Charles V himself bought the secular jurisdiction of the bishop of Utrecht in 1528, and in 1533 would have accepted a similar offer from the archbishop of Bremen if the pope had not objected. However, secularization in these cases mostly involved smaller properties, and rarely threatened spiritual jurisdiction.99

The evangelical movement posed an entirely new challenge through its objection to papal jurisdiction and its rejection of good works and prayer for the dead as justifying monasticism. Georg the Pious of Ansbach-Kulmbach did sequestrate religious houses in 1529 and then sell them to fund road and fortress construction in a move prefiguring Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–40). However, this was exceptional in the Empire, where ‘secularization’ generally meant a change of public use. Church assets were placed in public trusts by reform-minded princes and used to fund a more numerous and better-educated clergy, evangelize by teaching the population to read the Bible, and improve welfare through hospitals and poor relief. For example, the duke of Württemberg converted 13 monasteries into schools to train pastors in 1556.100 Conflict was not always inevitable. The complexity of legal and property rights in the Empire prevented a clear demarcation of jurisdiction and ownership, necessitating fairly frequent discussion between the different authorities. These discussions often continued despite religious animosities.101 However, many Catholics regarded the evangelicals’ re-designation of church property and use of spiritual jurisdictions as robbery breaching the public peace, and opened the so-called ‘religious cases’ in the imperial courts.102

Becoming Protestants

The problem fell to Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand I, who was left to oversee the Empire during the emperor’s prolonged absences after 1522. Ferdinand had inherited Hungary in 1526 amidst an Ottoman invasion. This existential threat to the Empire encouraged the imperial Estates to avoid matters that might escalate to civil war. The 1526 Reichstag at Speyer tried to uphold the Burgos edict by allowing imperial Estates to act according to their consciences until the papal-chaired church council ruled on doctrine. The decision essentially settled the question of authority by identifying the imperial Estates as responsible for religious affairs in their own territories. Electoral Saxony, Hessen, Lüneburg, Ansbach and Anhalt now followed the example of some imperial cities two years earlier and began converting church assets and jurisdictions to serve evangelical objectives. These decisions were influenced by the personal convictions of princes, the location of their lands, regional influence, and their relations to the Empire and papacy. For instance, thanks to its earlier concordats, Bavaria already enjoyed considerable control over the church on its territory and had little incentive to break with Rome.103

Given the long history of secular supervision of church affairs in the Empire, these changes did not automatically identify a territory as evangelical. Several important princes kept arrangements deliberately ambiguous, like the elector of Brandenburg, while religious practices amongst the bulk of the population remained heterodox. The new Lutheran territorial churches issued several revisions to its initial statement of faith, while other reformers like Huldrych Zwingli and Jean Calvin produced their own competing confessions. Similarly, Catholic thought and practice were hardly monolithic, and contained their own reforming impulses, so that we should speak of multiple Reformations.104

The growing divergence was nonetheless clear by the next Reichstag in Speyer in 1529. Catholics disputed the evangelicals’ interpretation of the 1526 meeting as a licence to forge ahead with religious reform. Since the majority of imperial Estates were still Catholic, they reversed the earlier decision and insisted on full enforcement of Charles V’s Edict of Worms banning Luther and his adherents. The ruling prompted the famous Protestatio, giving rise to the word ‘Protestant’ as the elector of Saxony led five princes and magistrates from 14 imperial cities in dissenting from the majority. This was the first open breach in the political unity of the Empire.

Failure of the Military Solution

The Protestants formed the Schmalkaldic League in 1531 for mutual defence (see pp. 564–5). The Ottoman threat encouraged Ferdinand to suspend the Worms edict in 1532 and then extend this truce three times by 1544. Meanwhile, the League was weakened by internal divisions and scandals amongst its princely leadership. Having temporarily gained ascendancy over France and the Ottomans in 1544–5, Charles V returned to the Empire with a large army. The elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hessen were declared outlaws after they attacked their regional rival, the duke of Brunswick. This allowed Charles to present his intervention as restoring the Empire’s public peace. The resulting Schmalkaldic War of 1546–7 saw the League’s comprehensive defeat, culminating in Charles’s victory at Mühlberg, which was celebrated in Titian’s famous portrait of the emperor as triumphant general (see Plate 8).

Charles held the ‘Armoured Reichstag’ (Geharnischte Reichstag) at Augsburg between September 1547 and June 1548 under a strong imperial military presence. Intended to consolidate his victory, this Reichstag represented the only time the emperor attempted to define doctrine by issuing a statement of faith that he hoped would last until the pope’s council, meeting in Trent, passed judgement. Known as the Interim, Charles’s statement offered ‘a new hybrid imperial religion’ incorporating some Protestant elements. Although the Interim was endorsed by the archbishop of Mainz, most Catholics already disavowed it ahead of its promulgation, while Protestants rejected it as an imposition.105

The unsatisfactory settlement was widely resented as a breach of consensus, and Charles was accused of exceeding his authority. Magdeburg’s armed defiance of the Interim galvanized more general opposition across 1551, leading to the Princes Revolt the following year that was backed by France, which had renewed its own war with the Habsburgs. Three months of manoeuvring convinced Ferdinand – who had again been left by Charles to manage the Empire – to agree the Peace of Passau on 31 July 1552. This provided the basis for a general settlement through the mutual renunciation of violence to settle religious disagreements.106

The Peace of Augsburg

The initiative had slipped from Charles to Ferdinand, who won support through his more consistent dealings with princes and adherence to constitutional norms. This allowed Ferdinand to convert the temporary arrangements evolving since 1521 into a more stable peace, securing broad acceptance of this as necessary to preserve the cherished imperial unity.107 The result was the agreement concluded at the 1555 Reichstag, which has entered history as the ‘Religious Peace’ but was known to contemporaries as the ‘Religious and Profane Peace’. The differences are important. The treaty annulled the Interim and deliberately avoided any religious statement.108 Rather than grant toleration, as was soon to be attempted in France, the peace extended political and legal rights to both Catholics and Lutherans. These privileges were part of a much longer document adjusting the Empire’s police, defence and financial arrangements as parts of a comprehensive constitutional package. The key questions of authority, property and jurisdiction were encompassed by the right of Reformation (ius Reformandi) granted to imperial Estates to manage the church and religious affairs in their territories. Possession of church property was fixed at the date of the Peace of Passau as the Empire’s ‘normative year’ (Normaljahr). Protestants accepted that the Reichskammergericht should resolve specific disputes. No imperial Estate was to transgress the property or jurisdiction of another, meaning that Catholic spiritual jurisdiction was now suspended over those territories embracing Lutheranism. Limited freedom of conscience and rights of emigration were extended to inhabitants who dissented from their territory’s official faith.

These arrangements have entered history as ‘he who rules decides the religion’ (cuius regio, eius religio), though the phrase is absent from the Peace and was only coined by Joachim Stephan, a Greifswald University law professor, in 1586. They are usually credited with strengthening the Empire’s supposed dualism between a weak emperor and more distinct principalities. Yet although rights were granted equally to both confessions, Catholic and Lutheran, they were distributed unevenly along the status hierarchy among imperial Estates. Regardless of faith, imperial cities lacked the full right of Reformation, as they were obliged to stick to whichever faith they had adopted by 1555. The imperial knights were excluded, while it was uncertain how far counts enjoyed the same powers as princes to change their subjects’ faith. In short, the Reformation’s political outcome reinforced the Empire’s existing development towards a mixed monarchy where the emperor shared power to differing degrees with a complex hierarchy of imperial Estates.

The imperial church was covered by a special clause known as the Ecclesiastical Reservation, because it obliged all incumbent bishops who converted from Catholicism to stand down, whilst also ruling that Protestants were ineligible for election as church princes. These restrictions were modified by Ferdinand’s Declaration, issued on his own authority separate from the Peace, which extended toleration to Protestant minorities in the imperial church lands.

Apart from Ferdinand’s Declaration, the Peace was collectively ‘owned’ by all imperial Estates, setting it apart from other western European settlements. Whereas other monarchies became confessionalized through identification with a single, official faith, the Empire remained simply Christian, while the legal position of Jews remained unaffected. This was potentially a source of great strength, since the autonomy and identity of both major religions rested on shared rights guaranteed by the confessionally neutral constitutional order. There was, however, a price: a modern separation of church and state was impossible, and religion remained integral to imperial politics. Formal political action remained open-ended: the Catholic majority ruling of the 1529 Reichstag had remained unenforceable, and it now appeared that future majority decisions would remain provisional until those in favour won acceptance from dissenters. The real decision of 1552–5 was the mutual renunciation of violence by the imperial Estates as part of this process.109

The Outcome Beyond Germany

Most accounts of the Reformation in the Empire stop at this point, interpreting developments as simply ‘German’ history. Yet all the major reformers thought in terms of a single, universal church, while the Empire was still much bigger than just Germany. The Peace of Augsburg settled matters between the emperor and those parts of the Empire that had acquired the status of imperial Estates during the late fifteenth-century constitutional reforms. The largest Estates were those areas under direct Habsburg rule in Austria and Burgundy, meaning that the imperial family shared the same rights granted to other princes. The treaties of Passau (1552) and Augsburg (1555) did not alter the Burgundian Treaty, which was part of the package of measures that Charles secured at the Armoured Reichstag in 1548. This assigned the Burgundian lands to his son, the future Philip II of Spain, who retained them when Charles partitioned his entire inheritance into Spanish and Austrian branches across 1551–8. As an imperial prince, Philip exercised his right of Reformation to instruct his Burgundian subjects to remain Catholic, but his violent methods contributed to what became the Dutch Revolt after 1566, leading to the eventual independence of the northern provinces (see pp. 228–9 and 594–8).

Bohemian religious affairs continued along their own route, reflecting that kingdom’s special place within the imperial constitution. The 1436 Compacta had been revised as the Treaty of Kuttenberg in 1485, guaranteeing the Utraquists autonomy at parish level through the appointment of their own priests, while forbidding lords to dictate their peasants’ faith. This arrangement prefigured that at Augsburg seventy years later in that it accepted only two confessions (in this case, Catholicism and Utraquism), whilst denying rights to dissenting minorities like the Bohemian Brethren. The Treaty of Kuttenberg was confirmed in 1512 and accepted by Ferdinand I when he became Bohemian king in 1526. For outsiders, Utraquists remained tainted by Hussite subversion and no one saw Kuttenberg as a desirable model for domestic religious peace.110 Yet the agreement remained legally binding despite the Peace of Augsburg, thanks to Bohemia’s political autonomy and the Habsburgs’ need to retain support amongst the Bohemian nobility. The spread of Lutheranism among German-speakers during the 1570s added to the kingdom’s religious pluralism. In his capacity as Bohemian king, Maximilian II gave oral sanction to the confessio Bohemica agreed between Utraquists, Lutherans and the Bohemian Brethren in 1575. Written confirmation was later extorted from his successor Rudolf II in 1609 in the form of the Letter of Majesty allowing dissenters to establish parallel administrative and ecclesiastical institutions. Although this was overturned during the Thirty Years War, the distinct course of Bohemian religious developments reinforced that kingdom’s autonomous place within the Empire.

The Reformation also strengthened similar political trends amongst the Swiss, who were still redefining their relationship to the Empire when the religious crisis broke. Theological differences reinforced this, because Swiss evangelicals followed their own reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, rather than Luther.111 The Swiss agreed their own version of cuius regio, eius religio in 1529, resolving the question of authority in favour of the cantonal governments. This collapsed in 1531, but the Catholic victory in the ensuing civil war ended Protestant expansion in the Confederation’s core regions. Protestants conceded legal guarantees for Catholic minorities in the condominia, the lands jointly administered by two or more cantons. Protestant minorities belatedly secured equivalent rights after another brief war in 1712. Like Bohemia, Switzerland was able to pursue its own path, because it already enjoyed considerable political autonomy, and remained outside the institutions created by imperial reform. The common heritage of the Empire is nonetheless apparent in the broad similarity of political and legal solutions to the problem of religious division.

Imperial Italy also lay largely outside the new common institutions, but was bound more closely to the Empire through the Habsburgs’ possession of Milan, as well as their acquisition through Spain of Naples and Sicily to the south. Itinerant evangelical preachers drew huge crowds, while senior clerics like Cardinal Contarini conceded the need for reform. The Italian Wars since 1494 were widely interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure and added to the sense of urgency. Charles V pressured a succession of popes to respond positively to the Protestant criticism of the Italian church. However, he remained within his interpretation of the Two Swords doctrine. After theologians failed to resolve their difference during talks at the 1541 Regensburg Reichstag, Charles allowed Pope Paul III to enforce Catholicism in Italy through the Inquisition and the new Jesuit Order.112

The Italian principalities were excluded from the Peace of Augsburg, because they were not imperial Estates, except the duchy of Savoy, which had been incorporated within the German kingdom during the fourteenth century. However, Savoy refrained from direct engagement in the events leading to Augsburg, pursuing instead its own, more western European-style settlement towards the Waldensian communities that had persisted in its Alpine and Piedmontese territories since the late twelfth century and had been reinvigorated through contact with Swiss reformers after 1532. The duke of Savoy granted special dispensation to designated villages in the Peace of Cavour on 5 June 1561, and allowed exiles to return provided the Waldensians refrained from proselytizing.113 This agreement was close to those adopted in France after 1562 and proved equally unstable, especially because the duke remained susceptible to pressure from other Catholic monarchs to renew persecution. The persistence of at least some form of toleration nonetheless contributed to the generally positive impression among German Protestant princes, who continued to regard the duke as a potential ally into the seventeenth century.

I am Aleks, thanks for listening.

[The Monarchs- Emmett Cooke. (full) slow rise, peak, fades out]

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