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By 1580 Europe's confessional boundaries were essentially fixed. The British kingdoms of England and Scotland were secure under the control of Protestant monarchs; in France a Calvinist minority was entrenched, but it was clear the nation would never be converted. In the Netherlands the Protestant north would never be recovered by Spain; the southern provinces would gradually assume a distinct Catholic identity. In Germany the oldest Lutheran states were now entering their third generation since the adoption of a Protestant church order. The Scandinavian kingdoms had also settled to life with a Lutheran state church. Only in eastern Europe would the tides shift in a significant manner, as the Habsburg victories of the 1620s allowed the suppression of the previously dominant Protestant estates of Hungary and Bohemia. That was for the future. For the moment the reality of a confessionally divided Europe was a generally accepted fact of European life and politics. It would be wrong, however, to believe that this relative stability, so clear in retrospect, had calmed the passions raised by the first Reformation conflicts. On the contrary, relations between the faiths remained fractious and unstable, coloured above all by fear. On the Protestant side, this was understandable enough. In 1580 memories of the terrible massacres of Paris (1572) and Antwerp (1576) were still fresh, a reminder of Catholic perfidy, and the imminent danger that hard-won freedoms could still be dashed away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reformation in Sweden and Finland has often been described as a peaceful transition from a universal, albeit corrupt, Catholic church to a pure, princely-led national church, but this idealistic picture is not entirely credible. In fact, the evangelical movement made a curiously hesitant beginning in the first generation of reformers. The preconditions for the reception of Protestantism within, as well as without, Germany differed significantly, because of the pluriformity of the religious, political, social and educational landscape. However, although the shape and progress of the individual evangelical movements in the various countries were moulded by local circumstances and pressures, the early Reformation never degenerated into parochialism. For all the regional and national variations, the national/territorial Reformations remained part of the same movement. Christianity had been brought to Sweden gradually. When Ansgar, the monk sent to the north by the emperor in 829, became archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, he became the religious leader of the whole Nordic missionary area. Three centuries later, in the first document relating to the church and Finland, a letter from Pope Alexander III sent in 1171 to the Swedish leaders, the state of Christianity in Finland is described as precarious. The federal relationship which is reported to have existed between Sweden and Finland at this time made it possible for missionaries to promote Christianity in Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘NON FUGIMUS SED FUGAMUR’: CHANGING VIEWS OF THE FLIGHT FROM ROME As we have seen, Jacobean writers across the whole doctrinal spectrum agreed on the importance of Revelation 18.4 (the flight from Babylon). Not only was it seen as a text which justified separation from the Church of Rome, but it was also interpreted as a divine command which could not be ignored. This was a point argued, not just by moderate puritans such as Willet and Bernard, but also by Calvinist conformists such as Powel, Hakewill and Bedell. Even an avant-garde conformist such as Andrewes argued that the Roman Church was Babylon. It did not exhaust the possible lines of defence, however. When William Bedell confronted the issue of what authority the Protestants had for leaving Rome, he resorted first to the familiar passage from Revelation. This was a justification which was sufficient in itself. But this did not mean that other arguments could not be made, and Bedell chose to buttress his position further by deciding to settle the argument ‘at the Bar of Reason out of the common Principles of Christian Doctrine’. Romanists could always quibble about whether the papal monarchy was Babylon and therefore, said Bedell, ‘let us for the present set aside the Mystical Arguments from this place, and all other Prophetical Circumstances’.Similarly, Anthony Wotton's popular Runne from Rome, which dealt specifically with the separation from Rome, bore the text of Revelation 18.4 on its title-page, but avoided discussing the issue of Antichrist because (as Wotton explained) it was a long controversy which had already been sufficiently disputed elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Reformation king, Christian III, died in 1559, an era had come to an end. By then most of the evangelical/Lutheran theologians who had worked for the Reformation in Denmark had either died or were to pass away within the next couple of years. Christian III was succeeded by his son, Frederik II (1559–88), who differed substantially from his father. Christian had been a godly and politically cautious monarch, whose reign had been determined to a large extent by the economic restraints imposed by the civil war (1534–6) which had preceded his accession to the throne in 1536. Frederik II proved both politically and militarily far more adventurous. He may not have differed from his father in religious outlook, but in personal commitment he did, and he was less directly involved in the affairs of the new Lutheran church in Denmark and Norway than his father had been. Frederik's reign was characterised by the growing influence of the nobility, which was the only estate represented on the Council (Rigsrådet) after the Reformation. In spite of having been hailed as his father's successor in Denmark in 1542, and in Norway in 1548, Frederik II had to accept a coronation charter in August 1559 which confirmed and augmented the power of the nobility. Frederik had already demonstrated his political and military ambitions when he, together with his uncle, Duke Adolph of Gottorp, conquered the Ditmarshes in the summer of 1559. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crucial event for Hungary's early Reformation, indeed for its whole history, occurred some nine years after Luther's protest first ignited the Reformation. On 29 August 1526, near Mohács, in south-western Hungary, the army of Louis Jagiello, the twenty-year-old King of Bohemia and Hungary, confronted what appeared to be a modest detachment of Turks. Some magnates advised the king to withdraw. Several bishops urged him to attack. They argued that Suleiman's main army was some distance away and, moreover, ‘God willed a Magyar victory’. The king ordered the charge. By five o'clock the battle was over. The small contingent of Turks had been joined by the Sultan's army of nearly two hundred thousand. Strewn across the battlefield were the wounded and the dead, among them the King, the archbishops of Esztergom and Kalocsa, five bishops, twenty-eight magnates, five hundred nobles and sixteen thousand troops; more than three-quarters of the Hungarian army. Mohács was a disaster for the Hungarians. But it also changed the political and military balance in east Central Europe. With the death of Louis, the crowns of Saint Stephen (Hungary) and Saint Vaclav (Bohemia) were claimed by the Habsburg Archduke of Austria, Ferdinand, born and raised in Spain. In accord with the treaties of Bratislava (1491) and of Vienna (1515) Ferdinand had married Anna, the sister of Louis, while his sister, Mary, had wed the Hungarian king. Ferdinand was thus able to claim the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia by right of inheritance and alliance. His claim, however, did not go uncontested. In both Hungary and Bohemia, the principle of royal election was vigorously maintained by the diets in which many nobles opposed the Habsburg claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The questions posed by the Reformation in France are different from those involved in countries that experienced a state Reformation. With the exception of Béam (Navarre), which cannot be considered as fully a part of France during the sixteenth century, Protestants were only rarely in a position to try and impose their religion and way of life upon an uncommitted or hostile population. For the most part their periods of domination in a particular city or region, dependent on the protection of the powerful and the fortunes of religious war, were too short to allow a sustained effort at the ‘Protestantisation’ of the populace. Instead we are dealing with the growth, at first slow then spectacular, of an initially clandestine and unorganised movement, all of whose adherents, however mixed their motives, were Huguenots because they wanted to be, in conscious opposition to the existing church and implicitly, whether they liked it or not, the state. In so doing they developed not only a new ecclesiastical organisation, eventually channelled by Calvinism, but also new political theories and an original morality and mentality. To this extent a recognisable French Protestantism was being forged during the period considered here, from the 1520s to the 1560s, although it was only from about 1555 onwards that French Protestantism would find a secure base and organised church structure. Equally important to the fate of the first tentative reforming initiatives of the first generation was the fact that French Catholicism was neither static nor monolithic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting upon the course of the Reformation in 1557, Heinrich Bullinger, successor to Zwingli and leader of the reformed church in Switzerland from 1532 until 1575, presented a gloomy and pessimistic assessment. God had revealed his truth to the German nation in these times and his people had proved themselves ungrateful. The immediate consequence of this infidelity, Bullinger believed, were the dreadful wars between the Emperor and the Protestants ravaging Europe. France, Germany and Italy were engulfed in battles, and Swiss soldiers, despite the persistent opposition of the reform movement to mercenary service, continued to die on foreign territory. Within the Confederation the Protestant cities of Basle and Berne pursued their protracted quarrels with Calvin's Geneva over matters of doctrine and church polity, whilst the Catholics, strengthened by the Council of Trent, were everywhere resurgent. The despair of the aging reformer at his desk in Zurich accurately reflects the general disappointment among Swiss reformers that the soaring hopes of the first generation had not been fulfilled. The Reformation had not, as Zwingli had originally anticipated, culminated in a unified alliance of evangelical states under the leadership of Zurich. Instead half the Confederation remained defiantly loyal to Catholicism, and even those states which had eventually followed Zurich into the Protestant camp pursued their own models of reform with a stubborn and, at times, cantankerous independence. Any survey of the Reformation in Switzerland should reflect this enduring diversity, a phenomenon which has to some extent been masked by the subsequent success of Zurich and Geneva in impressing their reforming ideals on a wider European movement later in the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed that eastern Central Europe was always a stronghold of Catholicism. This assumption, which rests on the outcome of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, ignores the fact that Protestantism was so widespread in the area throughout the sixteenth century that it largely reduced the Catholic Church to a minority. It endangered not only the church, but also the Catholic monarchy, for Protestantism everywhere in eastern Central Europe was rooted in the strong political position of the estates: in Poland, the Bohemian lands (Bohemia itself and the incorporated crown lands, Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia), Hungary and the east Austrian provinces of Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Karinthia, Styria and Krain. On the one hand, the firm representative system of the estates favoured and encouraged acceptance of the confessional alternative to the Catholic monarchy. On the other, Protestantism gave the estates a new and superior (because religious) basis for their self-awareness and their political aim of extending and consolidating their independence. Throughout the region the estates were in a strong position to restrict the freedom of action of the ruling power. In Bohemia, for instance, the king's military and financial requirements depended on the agreement of the Landtag (sném) or diet, and its willingness to raise taxes. So did the election and coronation of his successor. Laws could be passed only with the agreement of all three estates (curiae) of the diet: the higher nobility or barons, the lower nobility or knights, and the royal free cities. The supreme court (Landrecht) and the provincial government were made up of representatives of the nobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewed in retrospect it is in the years immediately after Luther first came to prominence as a theological writer that the Reformation appears most harmoniously and coherently international. Luther's writings certainly excited the interest of a wide international public: even the briefest glance at the contemporary comment on the ‘Luther affair’ leaves little doubt of this. Almost from the first months after Luther had begun to achieve notoriety in Germany, reports from across Europe testify to the intense interest aroused in his character, his writings and his fate. Thus, in May 1519, a Swiss student studying in Paris, Peter Tschudi, could note the avidity with which Luther's works were read in the city; even apparently, according to Luther's other correspondents, at the Sorbonne, later the relentless guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy. In Holland and Flanders meanwhile, much of the intellectual community seemed to have been caught up in the new controversies, as the correspondence of Erasmus bears sufficient testimony. It was probably from the Netherlands that numbers of Luther's works were also transported across the Channel to England, where they are known to have been read about this time. The scale of the intellectual interest in Luther's writings is captured in a famous letter to the reformer by the Swiss publisher Johannes Froben, who in February 1519 was in the process of publishing his second collected edition of Luther's Latin works. Froben wrote to Luther that he had despatched some 600 copies of this collection to France and Spain, and further consignments to England, Italy and the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two feuds – one between noblemen, the other between noblemen and a city – whose stories are told in this chapter are ‘normal exceptions’. That is to say that they are unusual only in that they are well documented. Whereas most other feud records, being fragmentary, highlight different, disjointed aspects of the phenomenon, here its salient features appear concurrently. This will facilitate putting the feud in context. To impart in this way a concrete sense of what a feud was like and, by extension, a preliminary interpretation, is the main aim of what follows. VESTENBERG VERSUS VESTENBERG The starting point of Veit von Vestenberg's career was relatively auspicious. His father Hans was most probably well off. His mother Margaretha came from an illustrious Franconian lineage, the von Thtingen. Yet from youth to old age Veit had to struggle hard for everything he wished to attain or even retain. In 1456 he had differences with one noble, and in 1463 he was in feud with another. The year 1466 brought new, more intimate enemies to the fore: members of his own family. This feud was over castle Haslach, one of the lineage's seats. It was resolved by Margrave Albrecht of Brandenburg. The settlement was, however, a short-lived one. In 1471 a feud broke out once again. It assumed, as far as Veit was concerned, a much more menacing aspect than the previous one: Margrave Albrecht sided with Veit's relations. Veit reacted harshly. He captured a margravial servitor, stormed the castle of another, and burned and caused extensive damage to property of other vassals of the prince. As a response, the margrave impounded Veit's property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is significant that the high point of irenicism in Habsburg Vienna corresponded with the reign of Maximilian II (1564–1576), for the most prominent feature of this phenomenon was its confessional neutrality. Maximilian's predecessor, Ferdinand I, though a tolerant ruler in many respects, was a loyal son of the Catholic church. Ferdinand had officially invited the Jesuits to the Austrian lands. Ferdinand's grandson, Rudolf II, was raised by a zealous Catholic mother. He had been educated in Spain at the court of his orthodox cousin, Philip II, and at the beginning of his reign he did indeed support more vigorous policies of Catholic reform. When he succeeded his father in 1576, a papal representative described the new emperor as “most Catholic and very religious.” Maximilian, the adiaphorist, stood in contrast to both his father and son. The enigmatic religious convictions of Maximilian II have puzzled historians since the emperor's death in 1576. A conflicting series of deathbed reports confuse the matter. A papal observer confirmed that Maximilian died an orthodox Catholic while others maintained that the Habsburg remained a crypto-Protestant to his last hour. Though historians have yet to reach a consensus on this issue, there are a few facts that can be agreed upon. From an early age he had a broad exposure to Protestantism. One of his first tutors was the Alsatian Wolfgang Schiefer who taught the young prince at Innsbruck between 1536 and 1538 before it was discovered that he was a Lutheran. Schiefer had studied at Wittenberg and was a friend of Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius, Ulrich von Hutten and Luther himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was the often caustic Voltaire who penned the famous line, “This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” Voltaire's aphorism has become a tired but popular cliché to the great annoyance of scholars who study this area of central Europe. Many who have cast a hurried glance at the complex bundle of imperial territories have wondered what inner logic kept this decentralized polity functioning for so long in a viable fashion. Thought by many a living anachronism, the Empire confounded its critics as it creaked forward through time displaying a remarkable ability to redefine itself for each new generation. It weathered a whole series of crises that often brought civil war or dynastic struggle to other European states. Our discussion of irenicism begins in one such period of crisis – years of political uncertainty when the Habsburg princes once more sought a new source of unity for the Empire and its estates. The decade 1545 to 1555 was particularly crucial for the emperor. This period began with the Habsburg triumph of the Schmalkaldic War when there seemed to be one last opportunity to reimpose a uniform religious and political settlement on the imperial lands. The Augsburg Interim of 1548 was Charles's final attempt to unite Catholic and Protestant. At the same time he also sought to establish a new confederation of German estates that would serve the Habsburgs as the Swabian League had done in the past. Both projects failed. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg at least temporarily acknowledged the strength of German particularism and the reality of a divided confessional polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daβ die englische Reformation sehr eigener Art gewesen sei, gehört zu den Gemeinplätzen der Geschichtsschreibung; oft wird hinzugesetzt, daβ sie einzig und allein einer Aktion des Staates entsprungen sei. Eine in ihrer Struktur und in vielen Zeremonien traditionelle Staatskirche gilt als einzigartig, und einzigartig auch darin, daβ angeblich nur ein Machtkalkül und realpolitische Umstände an Stelle einer religiösen Revolution sie hervorgebracht haben. Obwohl die jüngere Forschung davon viel in Frage gestellt hat, bleiben die allgemeineren Darstellungen besonders auβerhalb Englands noch bei der alten Deutung. Andererseits dominiert selbst in Deutschland heute nicht mehr die Überzeugung, daβ die deutsche Reformation sich einfach von Luther und vom geistigen Aufruhr herleiten lasse: man anerkennt besser die Bedeutung der oberdeutschen und schweizerischen Reformation und kommt allmahlich dazu, die Erklärung nur in den sozialen Umstanden und Spannungen zu suchen. Die Entdeckung, daβ in dem Abschied von Rom die Städte eine nicht weniger wichtige Rolle als die Fürsten gespielt haben, hat schon zu einer Version geführt, in der Straβburg als bedeutender denn Wittenberg erscheint und die Gesellschaftsprobleme den theologischen Streit in den Hintergrund drängen. Ich darf vielleicht bemerken, daβ diese Neuansichten gewiβ schon nach England gelangt sind (im Gegensatz zu der revidierten Geschichte Englands in Deutschland); meiner Ansicht nach hat man sogar das Neue zu eifrig geschluckt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it came to matters of faith, John Calvin was more interested in doing what was “right” than about being liked or complimented; or at least he wanted to give that impression. As he told Melanchton, no servant of God should concern himself with being popular. In December 1556, though, one Scottish refugee living in Geneva praised Calvin and his work as few others ever had, especially in the city itself. The man was John Knox, an aggressive Reformer who made Calvin and Farel seem timid in comparison. What he said about Calvin's Geneva has come to be regarded as perhaps the greatest testimony to the way in which Calvinism sought to turn its theological vision into a concrete social and political reality: I neither fear nor ashame to say, [Geneva] is the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in earth since the days of the Apostles. In other places, I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place. Yet, only two years earlier, when Calvin and Knox first met, the two men had disagreed about the way in which such a state of affairs could be achieved in less receptive lands, such as England and Scotland. As in the other cases we have witnessed where pupil met master, Calvin could not bring himself to accept the new dimensions being given to his own teachings by this refugee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not easy to scan the broad spectrum of popular and learned responses to social conditions in Reformation Germany in the middle of the sixteenth century. Yet, if the pamphlet literature from this period can serve as a guide, one theme often stood out above all others: the fear of social, political, and religious disorder, the perception that the underpinnings of the whole social order were dangerously unstable, uncertain, continually in flux. That many pamphleteers still held up for their readers the social values of a society of orders – hierarchy, social harmony, religious unity, corporate solidarity, the common good, deference, obedience – could only have intensified the feeling for many that society had become unstable. For those ideals bore even less resemblance to social reality in 1550 than they had fifty years before. Out in the countryside, in a rural society like Hohenlohe, specific events and social conditions – the Peasants' War, the fear of rural unrest, the continued decay of the church, the uncertain power of the counts in the empire, the spread of poverty and population growth, the erosion of communal solidarity – lay behind the views voiced by contemporary observers of society. Protestant reformers called to Öhringen in the 1540s and 1550s, for example, were all deeply distressed by the social disorder and decay they saw around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘We have had here disputacion for wordes, and that is a gret parte of that the wourlde is nowe troubled with’ A central problem of the reformation was the need to express new, or newly recognised, doctrinal and political realities in the inherited language of the canon law, while adjusting or denying its implications. Revolutionary ideas are of necessity couched largely in familiar words and concepts, whatever the startling underlying assumptions, and this was certainly true of the sixteenth century when newfangledness was taken for falsehood. But sharing the problem with other revolutionary eras did not make it easier for leaders and clerics to distinguish between divine and human, eternal and temporal, with intellectual tools and ancient examples which could be taken to justify any stance. As Melanchthon said, either in humour or resignation, if the early Fathers had only known what trouble future generations would take in their interpretation, they would surely have made their meaning more clear. This was far from a simply academic problem. As consensus broke down, the tendency was, as Cranmer observed, to call ‘divine institution’ anything that people think well done; yet it was precisely at such moments of fragmentation that winning the intellectual argument seemed so critical. The story of the schismatic and doctrinal conflict in mid-Tudor England can be written round the theme of legal and scriptural authority. In the 1520s Henry VIII's desire for Anne Boleyn and a male heir was expressed in (rival) glosses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, however irrelevant Charles V's control of Rome makes such antics seem in retrospect. In the subsequent confrontation with the papacy no medieval or dimly pre-historical exemplum was neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reign of Maximilian I (1459–1519) had given the empire much new strength. The emperor, a powerful and dynamic personality, proved capable of taking some decisive decisions. When he maintained his hold over the Tyrol and the Habsburg possessions in Swabia (1488–90) he made sure that the king of the Romans should not be pushed aside to the periphery of the empire. In doing so, he also managed to reactivate the traditional supporters of the crown, especially the Swabians. The Swabian League, founded in 1488, became an important instrument of Habsburg policy in the empire at the same time as it was becoming attractive to the German princes. However, not even Maximilian was able to alter the inmost reality of German constitutional history: king and territories continued to stand side by side. There was no process of centralisation initiated by the king, though the danger that the great men might destroy the Imperial federation was removed by Maximilian's consolidation of his kingship, a process generally given the name of imperial reform. At the Diet of Worms in 1495, important new directions were taken in hand, all of them testifying to the co-existence of king and territories on terms which before this had emerged from a laboriously negotiated compromise. In return for a tax granted by the Diet, the king proclaimed an ‘eternal territorial peace’ directed against the right, claimed by the nobility, to wage private war. This constituted an important step in the consolidation of the empire. The king's Chamber Court was so reformed that it might be able to control conflicts hitherto settled by licensed fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘I simply taught, preached, wrote God's Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that neither a prince or emperor inflicted such damage upon it.’ If Luther actually spoke these words recorded in his Table Talk, he betrayed either a faulty memory or a poor grasp of political realities. It is true that he often exerted little influence on the storm that swirled around him, although he stood at its epicentre, but it was certainly not true that the Word did it all. The long-term success of demands for religious reform, even in the limited form it was to take in Germany, depended in the last resort on politics, which in turn crucially influenced the institutional shape it was to take. From the very beginning, the reform of religion was so entangled with political issues of many different kinds, that it could never give rise to an unpolitical Reformation: to put it bluntly, without politics, no Reformation. As soon as ‘Luther's cause’ became a matter of public debate, the fate of religious reform was tied to princely politics within the Holy Roman Empire, for Luther's very survival depended on the protection afforded him by the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. Frederick was certainly convinced of Luther's sincerity and integrity by advisors such as his chaplain Georg Spalatin and his chancellor Gregor Brück, but his willingness to take this protection to its limits was also influenced by a streak of anti-Habsburg politics shared by many other princes of the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1520s the Reformation took root in Denmark and quickly spread over a wide area. As in Germany, the ground had been prepared beforehand. There were many signs in the later middle ages of an increasing need for religion among the people, as well as numerous complaints that the church was on the decline and willing to abuse its power. With few exceptions the bishops were inadequate for their tasks – noble landowners without any real sense of the religious needs of the age. Bishoprics and greater benefices were reserved for the aristocracy, which meant that the higher clerics were closely bound to the nobility and the gap between them and the parish priests was wide. Humanism was widespread among the clergy, many of whom had studied at foreign universities. One of the most important representatives of this biblically based humanism and of the movement for Catholic reform was the Carmelite friar Paulus Helie who in 1520 became the head of the order's new foundation in Copenhagen, while at the same time lecturing on the Bible at the university. His ideas rested on the Bible which he interpreted according to the Fathers of the church. He violently attacked the worldliness of the clergy and the customs and superstitions fostered by the church, but although he had originally hailed Luther as a welcome ally, he completely rejected him when he realised that the Lutheran movement was leading to a break with the church, for ‘abuse does not abolish use’. Though consistent, Helie's standpoint was untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]