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The European Reformation (1517-1598)

Luther was not the first man to challenge the teachings of the Church. Preachers such as John Wycliffe of England and Jan Hus of Bohemia had already stated that people had the right to read the Bible and to interpret it for themselves. They had been persecuted by the Church as a result. The Church had done itself no favours during the previous centuries, regularly demanding money from its flock and growing rich and lazy on the proceeds, so when the general population in Europe became more urbanised and educated, they began to resent the demands of the clergy. 

Luther had been horrified by what he had seen in a journey to Rome in 1510, namely the Church selling indulgences – documents issued by the Church to reduce time in purgatory and grant the buyer remission from the need to do penance for sins. His reading of the Bible had led him to the conclusion that one did not need to labour to win God’s favour, as one could not in that way influence how God behaves towards us. Christians were saved by faith and faith alone, and no amount of good works, or indeed even the purchase of indulgences, made any difference at all. The consequence of this was that he rejected the authority of the Pope, denied that priests had any special power over laymen, and asserted the Bible as the sole source of Christian truth:

 One did not need to do penance, to make costly pilgrimages, to venerate the wasted carcasses of supposed saints; one did not need to make sacrifices. Above all one did not need to buy the tawdry goods the Church peddled to its deluded flock in order to raise the cash it needed for its wars, for its vast buildings, for the paintings, the sculptures, the carved woodwork, the golden goblets and the bejewelled inlaid cases in which the relics of the sanctified laid, and that it relentlessly commissioned from all the finest and most expensive artists and craftsmen in Europe.⁶³

In 1517, as the Ottomans were capturing Egypt from the Mamluks, whose economy had also suffered from the discovery of the maritime spice route, Luther wrote his famous 95 arguments against the sale of indulgences and sent them to his local bishop. With the help of his friends and of the printing presses, Luther’s arguments spread like wildfire, leading Pope Leo X to condemn Luther's teachings in a papal decree. 

Not one to be told what to do, Luther burned the decree, as a result of which, in 1521, he was invited by Emperor Charles V to recant his views. With the Ottomans at the back door, the last thing Charles needed was a divided Germany. Luther refused and would only recant, he said, if the scriptures told him to do so, an act for which we was outlawed as a heretic. Fortunately for Luther, many of the German princes were keen to remain independent from the encroaching Spanish power and he gained the protection of one of them. 

Luther’s challenge to traditions and to ecclesiastical authority made him the focus for pent-up religious and economic discontent, and many peasants used the opportunity to air their resentment of the church authorities. It seemed obvious to many of them that the church favoured their oppressors. When the complaints gained traction they turned into a rebellion and then, in 1525, into a full-scale peasant revolt. Unfortunately for the peasants, Luther had ‘released a conflagration upon Europe far greater and far more radical than any he had himself intended’,⁶⁴ and instead of supporting them, he gave his support to German nobles intent on putting out the flames of insurrection. 

It was not long before the Reformation swept through Western Europe, as ‘national and dynastic rivalries had now fused with religious zeal to make men fight on where earlier they might have been inclined to compromise’.⁶⁵ While Luther had the most influence in Germany, the Swiss and the Dutch were heavily influenced by the Protestant teachings of an exile from France, John Calvin, who preached predestination, namely that God had already decided who would be damned and who would be saved.⁶⁶ Protestants in France, known as Huguenots, were brutally suppressed and war raged between Protestants and Catholics there until the Protestants were granted freedom of worship in 1598 by Henry IV under the Edict of Nantes.⁶⁷ In England, the new teaching would give King Henry VIII just the reason he needed to renounce the authority of the Pope completely and divorce his Catholic wife and daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Catherine of Aragon.

The Reformation had a huge impact, both positive and negative, on the development of the West. It allowed great parts of Europe to throw off the shackles of Catholic dogma and develop the freedom of thought that was necessary for innovation; but it also separated the Christians of northern and southern Europe, a division that ultimately led to religious wars that did not abate until 1648.