2
THE EMPIRE
Events in the Holy Roman Empire before 1618 were not without drama, but it was that of the courtroom rather than the battlefield. Sixteenth-century Central Europeans were embroiled in long-running – and often long-winded – legal disputes that later generations have dismissed as tedious and irrelevant, compressing the decades prior to the Thirty Years War into a short narrative of confessional and political polarization towards inevitable war. This is understandable, since the Empire can be exceedingly difficult to explain.
The indefatigable Johann Jakob Moser, who found time outside his legal career to compose six hundred Protestant hymns and raise eight children, gave up trying to describe the imperial constitution after publishing over a hundred volumes in the later eighteenth century. The only way to approach the problem, as T.C.W. Blanning has aptly remarked, is to love anomaly, since the Empire did not fit any recognized pattern.1 This is the reason behind the famous seventeenth-century depiction of the Empire as a ‘monstrosity’ by the philosopher Samuel Pufendorf, who pointed out that it was neither a ‘regular kingdom’, nor a republic. Another contemporary metaphor offers a better starting point. Natural philosophers like Descartes were beginning to explain the world in mechanical terms, interpreting living organisms and planetary motion as complex mechanisms. In this context, the Empire appears a slow, cumbersome juggernaut, operated by an intricate, elaborate yet surprisingly robust internal system of weights and balances. The kings of France, Sweden and Denmark might smash at this machine with their swords, while the sultan battered it with his mace, denting the exterior and disrupting some of the more delicate parts, but this did little to alter its lumbering progress.
Communities
What propelled this juggernaut was the labour of millions of peasants and common folk living in the 2,200 towns, at least 150,000 villages, and numerous monasteries, convents and other communities across the Empire. It was at the level of these communities that things got done: people married, children were born, work was organized, crops harvested, goods made and exchanged. It is these communities that dominate Matthäus Merian’s Topographia Germaniae, a monumental publishing venture that was begun while the war was still at its height in the 1630s and not completed until forty years later.2 The work contains scarcely any description of the natural environment, instead grouping by region all the settlements that Merian and his collaborators had visited or heard of, and then describing them in alphabetical order. The numerous accompanying engravings perfectly illustrate the three elements of these communities and how they related to the structures of power within the Empire.
Each settlement is shown clearly against the countryside, delineating the community as a distinct social space. Most were located on rivers, essential for communications with the wider world, as well as for carrying away rubbish and providing some barrier against intruders. Unlike modern rivers, those of the seventeenth century still followed their natural course, swelling with heavy rain or melted snow and spreading out wherever there were meadows or low-lying land. Larger streams changed course over time, leaving islands and inlets that ingenious bridge-builders incorporated in their structures to span the water. Medieval walls surrounded towns and larger villages, often using rivers or streams to provide a wet ditch around the settlement. These high, but relatively thin walls, with their prominent towers and gatehouses, were being supplemented by additional, more modern outer defences to protect against artillery bombardment. Some cities had acquired these defences already, in the sixteenth century, but most built them, or modernized existing structures, in the 1620s as the dangers of war became more pressing. The thick, low-lying walls, with their massive, stone-fronted bastions, spread outwards round the medieval core, sometimes encompassing newer suburbs, other times brutally sweeping these away to clear fields of fire. Only those with an experienced eye could make out the elaborate geometrical patterns they cut into the ground, since the systems of walls, outworks and ditches were largely hidden from view on the ground by additional banks of earth pushed further into the countryside. The few buildings that remained outside the walls were either those used for industrial purposes, like sawmills or brick kilns, or were ecclesiastical foundations, like monasteries or convents that constituted separate communities themselves.
Even small villages and hamlets were fenced in to keep out wild animals and mark their inhabitants’ sense of place. Gates would be closed at dusk, and were guarded even in relatively tranquil times. Those passing through would be asked their business and often obliged to pay a toll on their goods. The walls, and more particularly the expense and trouble of expanding them, kept housing crammed close together, building upwards to a third storey or more in larger cities, and using every possible space beneath the roof and in the cellar. Stone or brick was often used only on the ground floor, with the rest being built around a timber frame. Fire was an ever-present danger, often doing far more damage than military action. Proximity encouraged inquisitiveness. A habitually drunken neighbour was not only a reprobate; he was a fire hazard. Likewise, communities were rarely sufficiently large to be anonymous. Society remained face-to-face and outsiders immediately attracted comment and frequently suspicion. The approach of war would bring large numbers of armed strangers across the rolling hills, or through the woods towards the settlement. They would speak different dialects or even foreign tongues. There would be many mouths to feed; often more than the community itself. If the intrusion was contested, there was the risk that familiar landmarks would be damaged or obliterated. A breach in the walls violated the community’s protected space and signalled an assault that was almost invariably followed by plunder, pillage and often worse.
The church spires that rose prominently above the walls and rooftops pointed to a second, theological dimension to each settlement as a community of believers. Churches were generally built of stone and were among the largest structures in each settlement. They are carefully identified in Merian’s engravings, each one being labelled and the more important sometimes given a separate plate of their own. Even relatively small towns would have four or more churches, each serving as the focal point of its parish. Larger villages with a church would provide for the spiritual needs of the surrounding hamlets. Monasteries and convents offered additional places of worship. The number and size of these buildings testifies not only to the significance attached to faith, but also to the economic muscle of organized religion that was present in all important communities.
The other buildings a traveller would see from afar were those associated with political authority. The town hall, palace or bailiff’s house were the largest buildings alongside churches, generally far more substantial and certainly more ornate and imposing than any industrial structures. Like the churches, they symbolized the inhabitants both as a distinct group and as members of a wider community. Towns and most villages enjoyed considerable autonomy over their internal affairs, managing these through representatives elected from the enfranchised inhabitants, generally male property owners who were married heads of families. Arrangements varied considerably, but generally included jurisdiction over lesser offences, limited powers to raise resources and labour for common tasks, and the management of land and economic assets held communally. Crucially, these powers usually included the right to decide who could reside in the community and sanctions that could be imposed on those who transgressed its norms. Yet no community was completely independent. Anyone entering its principal government building would see a carved or painted coat of arms, identifying a higher authority to which the community would answer.
It was the imperial constitution that linked these thousands of settlements by binding them in a series of hierarchically ordered, overlapping jurisdictions. Though ‘Germany’ appeared in the title of Merian’s work, it actually covered the Empire, an area that still stretched for over 680,000km2, including not only all of modern Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, but also much of western Poland, and Alsace and Lorraine that are now in France. While missing in Merian, most of the modern Netherlands and Belgium were also still associated with the Empire in 1600, as was a further 65,000km2 of northern Italy, even if these regions were not represented in imperial institutions.3
Emperor and Princes
As a whole, the Empire symbolized the late medieval universal ideal of a single Christendom. Its ruler was the only Christian monarch with an imperial title, elevating him above all other crowned heads. His pretensions to be the secular head of Europe rested on the idea of the Empire as the direct continuation of that of ancient Rome and so the last of the four great world monarchies prophesied in the Book of Daniel. The universal ideal was very distant from the arena of practical politics in the localities, ensuring that the emperor did not rule the numerous communities directly. Instead, his authority was mediated through the Empire’s hierarchy of jurisdictions that in turn related to its medieval, feudal origins. The emperor was the superior lord over a host of lesser authorities bound in chains of vassalage. The distinctions between these lords had grown sharper, particularly as the Empire had to deal with a variety of internal and external problems since 1480. A fundamental division had emerged between those lords who were immediately under the emperor’s jurisdiction (Reichsunmittelbar), and those ‘mediate’ authorities who were subordinate to intervening jurisdictions.
Immediate lords possessed full imperial fiefs (Reichslehen) held directly from the emperor in his capacity as their feudal overlord. These fiefs were generally composed of other, lesser fiefs held by mediate lords, or other jurisdictions exercised by subordinate communities. Thus, the towns, villages and other settlements were bound together within a complex legal and political web of rights, prerogatives and jurisdictions. These rights gave whoever possessed them a claim on the respect, subservience and resources of those bound by them. A lord exercising jurisdiction over a village could expect the deference of its inhabitants, a share of their produce and some of their time and labour for certain tasks. In return, he or she was expected to protect their interests against malevolent outsiders, uphold their communal distinctiveness within the wider imperial framework, and to intervene in the management of their internal affairs to resolve serious problems.
The strength of the community as social and political space meant that these rights were rooted in the land, so that whoever held them, held authority over that area. However, those holding one type of authority were not necessarily barred from possessing another; thus the lord of an immediate imperial fief might also hold other land that bound him in vassalage to one of his peers. Similarly, the presence of the church, with its vast material resources, created a host of ecclesiastical lords that had traditionally had a close relationship with the emperor and who considered themselves collectively as the ‘imperial church’ (Reichskirche). The material basis of the imperial church rested on the settlements and assets it controlled through its possession of imperial fiefs and other jurisdictions. However, these territorial jurisdictions did not match spiritual jurisdictions that extended to the churches in the settlements held by secular lords. Finally, jurisdictions could be shared by more than one lord, while different lords could hold separate rights in the same community.
Most rights were acquired by inheritance and were held by the 50-60,000 noble families living in the Empire. The vast majority of these were ‘territorial nobles’ (Landadel), possessing only lesser rights subject to the superior jurisdiction of the exclusive group of lords with imperial fiefs. There were around 180 lay and 130 spiritual fiefs that collectively constituted the territories of the Empire. They varied considerably in size, and there was no direct correlation between geographical extent and political weight. The Empire had taken shape when its population had been concentrated in the south and west. The density of settlement in these parts enabled them to sustain a higher concentration of lordships than the more sparsely populated north and east that were not fully incorporated in the imperial constitution until the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Consolidation of the constitution forged the lay and spiritual lords into three groups by 1521. The smallest, but most senior, were the seven electors who held the fiefs associated in the Golden Bull of 1356 with the exclusive right to chose each emperor. The prevailing social distinctions gave precedence to the clergy as ‘first Estate’ over the nobility, on account of their societal function of praying for the entire community’s salvation. The premier electorate was thus that of the archbishop of Mainz, followed by his colleagues in Cologne and Trier, none of whom had many more than 100,000 subjects. The secular electorates were headed by the kingdom of Bohemia, the only land with a distinct royal title in the Empire (see Chapter 3). Bohemia was also the largest electorate, covering 50,000km2 and with 1.4 million inhabitants living in 102 towns, 308 market centres, 258 castles and 30,363 villages and hamlets with 2,033 parish churches. Brandenburg was the next in size, but the most junior in status, covering 3 6,000km2but with only 350,000 people. Saxony was smaller, but more densely populated with around 1.2 million subjects. The Palatinate ranked second after Bohemia, covered about 11,000km2 in two parts, one (Lower) on the Rhine, the other (Upper) north of Bavaria, with a combined population of about 600,000. Together, the electors held around a fifth of the Empire, and over a sixth of its population.
The other imperial fiefs fell broadly into one of two types. Fifty spiritual and thirty-three lay fiefs were held by lords of princely rank, though their actual titles ranged from archbishop and bishop, through duke, landgrave and margrave (marquis). All lay fiefs were formally acquired by inheritance or purchase; in both cases the transfer was subject to the emperor’s approval. Spiritual rulers, including the three electors, were chosen by the cathedral or abbey canons of the principal church in their land, again subject formally to the emperor’s and, in this case, pope’s agreement. The number of princes was always less than the total of fiefs, since it was possible for electors to acquire princely fiefs, while existing princes could hold more than one and prince-bishops might seek election in another see. The Habsburg dynasty was the most successful of all princely families in accumulating influence this way, having acquired not only the eleven Austrian provinces but also Bohemia and its associated lands, together with the seventeen Netherlands provinces, giving them 303,000km2 of territory, or over two-fifths of the entire Empire. With the parts of Hungary that also fell to the dynasty in 1526, the Habsburgs governed over 7 million subjects by 1600, compared with around 17 million people in the rest of the Empire. This territorial base ensured the dynasty’s virtual monopoly of the imperial title between 1438 and the end of the Empire in 1806. They stood head and shoulders above the other princes, few of whom had more than 100,000 subjects.
The second group of around 220 fiefs were smaller still and lacked full princely status, ruled by a count, lord or prelate, most of whom had only a few thousand subjects. A further 400 baronial and knightly families held a further 1,500 fiefs directly from the emperor as ‘imperial knights’ (Reichsritter). Individually, their holdings were no larger than those of the far more numerous territorial nobility who lacked the status of imperial immediacy, and they had ceased to play a significant role in imperial politics by the mid-sixteenth century.
Cities
The vast majority of communities fell under one or more of these jurisdictions, but some remained outside lordly control. The most important were the eighty or so ‘free and imperial cities’ that lay mainly in Swabia and Franconia, the old imperial heartlands of the south and west. They included most of the Empire’s largest settlements, notably Augsburg, which was the biggest with 48,000 inhabitants, or four times the size of Berlin. It headed a small group of Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne, Lübeck and Strasbourg, each with around 40,000 people. They were followed by places like Frankfurt, Bremen, Ulm and Aachen, with about 20,000 inhabitants apiece, and by a far larger number of towns like Nordhausen, Heilbronn, Rothenburg and Regensburg, with less than half that. Most had fewer than 4,000 inhabitants, though some, like Schwäbisch-Hall, controlled a significant number of surrounding villages. The cities’ influence rested in part on their direct relationship to the emperor that preserved them from incorporation within neighbouring principalities. Anyone doing business with the bailiff of Eriskirch village by Lake Constance in 1619 would see the arms of the city of Buchhorn above the door – the city’s symbols of a tree and a hunting horn, identifying it as lord of Eriskirch, which it had acquired in 1472, while the city’s allegiance to the emperor and the Empire was shown by the imperial arms above its own. The black double-headed eagle symbolized the fusion of the Empire with the former kingdom of Germany. Surrounding the eagle was the Order of the Golden Fleece, badge of a chivalric order founded in 1429 to defend the church. This was the highest distinction awarded by the Habsburgs, directly linking their family to the emperor’s traditional role as Christendom’s protector. The red-white-red Habsburg colours were reproduced at the centre of the eagle, further underscoring the dynasty’s association with the imperial title, and the city’s membership of the Empire under their authority.4
The Imperial Constitution
Direction of the Empire was shared between the emperor and his vassals, but given the hierarchical character of the constitution, rights and responsibilities were divided unequally. The emperor was overlord and sovereign, holding considerable reserve powers that derived directly from his title rather than possession of any fief. These imperial prerogatives were deliberately left vague, because fixing them in law would imply limits to the emperor’s universal pretensions. However, the need to deal with pressing problems forced the emperor and his vassals to define their relationship more precisely and created additional powers at various intermediary levels between the emperor and the Empire’s component communities. Though the Habsburgs monopolized the imperial title, they did not hold it by right, but had to negotiate with the electors to secure acceptance. It was possible to persuade the electors to accept an emperor designate, known as the king of the Romans, who could assume power on his father’s death. Otherwise, there would be an interregnum regulated by the Golden Bull. This handed imperial prerogatives to the elector of Saxony in the north and the elector Palatine in the south, while fixing a deadline within which all seven electors were to convene and select a successor under the direction of the elector of Mainz as arch-chancellor of the Empire. Candidacy was not open to all, since the emperor was not a kind of life president but a sovereign majesty, which presupposed that whoever was chosen would already possess certain ‘royal’ qualities.
The growth of Habsburg resources made the dynasty the obvious choice, since imperial prerogatives conferred executive authority but supplied few means to put decisions into effect. The electors expected the emperor to use his own lands to fund not only his personal court and imperial institutions, but also much of the defence against the Ottomans and other, Christian enemies. However, they recognized that changes in warfare made this impossible without some assistance from the rest of the Empire. The princes and cities accepted this as well, as the willingness to contribute imperial taxes became the criterion for imperial immediacy, marking them out from all the other lords and towns that merely paid into territorial treasuries. These imperial contributions became known as ‘Roman months’ after the cost of the escort intended to take Charles V to his coronation in Rome. Each territory was assessed according to a scale fixing its share of a single month’s pay for 24,000 soldiers. Taxes could be raised as fractions or multiples of this basic quota, and levied either as a one-off payment, or spread across several months or even years.
Matriculation in the tax register by 1521 became the deciding factor in whether a particular territory secured representation in the imperial diet, or Reichstag, and so secured recognition as an imperial Estate (Reichsstand). The Reichstag was not a parliament in the modern sense, but embodied the early modern principle of representation through the monarch’s obligation to consult his leading subjects on matters of common concern. True to the Empire’s hierarchical nature, such consultation took place in three separate colleges of electors, princes and cities. The composition of the princely college was still in flux at this stage, since the existing princes were reluctant to accord full participation to the more numerous counts and prelates who were forced to share a handful of votes between them. The emperor held the initiative through his right to propose subjects for debate. Each college took a decision by majority vote, with each member or their representative speaking in turn according to a strict order of precedence. The colleges then conferred in pairs, the electors generally talking to the princes, before consulting the cities. Once a mutually acceptable wording had been hammered out, the collective decision was presented as a ‘recommendation’ to the emperor, who was free to accept or reject it. If he accepted it, it was incorporated into the concluding document, called an imperial Recess, issued when the Reichstag finished. The Reichstag had emerged relatively rapidly from about 1480 in response to new problems and its legislation created precedents that were incorporated into the imperial constitution. While not formally obliged to consult it, it became the only way the emperor could secure binding agreements on all territories, and it was a useful forum to test opinion and lend greater legitimacy to his policies. Though cumbersome, the Reichstag met fairly regularly at the emperor’s request throughout the sixteenth century, passing a considerable body of legislation, as well as voting increasingly regular taxes to sustain a permanent defence against the Turks (see Chapter 4).
Additional taxes were raised to discharge the other principal constitutional task of preserving internal order and resolving disputes between the different lords and cities. The Reichstag of 1495 agreed a perpetual public peace, obliging the emperor and all his vassals to submit their disagreements to independent arbitration through a new supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, which was soon set up in the imperial city of Speyer. The emperor could name only the presiding judge and a few of his assistants. The territories proposed other candidates who were then selected by the sitting judges and swore an oath to the court that superseded any obligation they might have to a territorial master. The imperial legal system has received a very bad press from later generations, not least for failing to resolve the problems leading to the Thirty Years War. However, its development enabled the Empire to make the transition from violent self-help through feuds to peaceful arbitration in the court, where the aim was not so much to establish absolute truth or guilt, but to secure mutually acceptable, and hence workable, solutions. The system was expanded in the 1520s to deal with unrest within territories, as well as conflicts between them. The electorates and larger territories created their own judiciaries that were partially outside the supreme court’s jurisdiction, but possibilities of both appeal and intervention remained. The emperor accepted the court’s independence not least because he was able to establish another court based in Vienna. This Reichshofrat dealt with matters relating directly to imperial prerogatives, but since these were ill-defined, they provided a legal basis to intervene in areas originally intended for the Reichskammergericht. Though creating potentially conflicting jurisdictions, this also gave the Empire a second legal heart that could beat faster if the case load paralysed the Reichskammergericht.
Court verdicts were enforced through regional institutions interposed between the territories and the Empire. Territories were assigned to one of ten Kreise, or ‘circles’, to select candidates for the Reichskammergericht, and to raise the regular subscription to maintain it, as well as special imperial taxes and troop contingents to enforce internal peace, or defend the Empire. Imperial law evolved by 1570 to give considerable scope for autonomous action at this level. Each Kreis had its own assembly where, unlike at the Reichstag, each member had a single vote in a common chamber, thus giving the minor ones greater weight. The Kreis assemblies were summoned by the emperor, or through an imperial Recess, or on a local initiative by their convening princes, generally one lay and one ecclesiastical lord for each region. The assemblies offered additional fora to resolve disputes, debate policy and coordinate action. Their development varied, depending on how much they were needed by their members. The Habsburg lands were grouped into separate Burgundian and Austrian Kreise that they alone dominated, while the Bohemian lands were omitted from the structure entirely. The four Rhenish electors banded together to form one Kreis, despite the fact that much of their territory was scattered in other regions. The smaller western and southern territories were grouped into more compact Lower Rhenish (or Westphalian), Upper Rhenish, Swabian, Franconian and Bavarian Kreise. The latter was dominated by the duchy of Bavaria, which, with over 800,000 inhabitants, was the largest principality and richer than the electorates. The presence of thirteen other members, notably the archbishop of Salzburg, prevented the duke from completely dominating the Bavarian Kreis. The northern lands were divided into the Upper (eastern) and Lower (western) Saxon Kreise. The former was dominated by Brandenburg and Saxony, while the latter was more evenly balanced between a number of bishoprics and duchies.
Political Culture
Thus, most of the imperial fiefs were both imperial Estates and Kreis Estates, represented in the Reichstag and their regional assembly. The emperor could approach them either in his capacity as their personal overlord, or through his representatives in the Reichstag, imperial courts or Kreis assemblies. Except in his own dynastic lands, he had no direct claim on the vast majority of the Empire’s inhabitants that lived under the authority of one or more of the territorial lords. Representation in imperial institutions made these lords advocates of ‘German Freedom’, the language of liberty in seventeenth-century imperial politics. This did not equate liberty with equality or fraternity, but with ‘liberties’, or the privileges, immunities and rights accruing to individuals as members of a legally recognized corporate group. As imperial Estate-members, the territorial lords enjoyed their own special set of liberties, marking them out from their subjects and vassals. Their liberties gave them the privilege of being consulted by the emperor and a share in the collective governance of the Empire. But they also brought the responsibility of defending the autonomy and rights of their own territories and the peoples and communities that composed them. It is here that the checks and balances of the imperial juggernaut become most apparent. Each lord or prince sought to maintain his or her particular place within the imperial hierarchy. No one thought of independence. Even the largest electorates lacked the resources for an independent political existence, while all rulers derived their authority and status from their membership of the Empire, setting themselves apart from aristocrats in other countries who were the subjects of mere kings. As imperial Estate-members, they distinguished between the emperor and the Empire. They were loyal to both, but their ties to the emperor were personal, whereas that to the Empire was collective and corporate.
In the sixteenth century, political systems, both in the Empire and elsewhere in Europe, were shifting from personal dealings with an overlord to subordination to an impersonal state that transcended the lives of its rulers. The coronation of Emperor Maximilian II in 1562 was the last to be attended by all electors in person. While minor counts and prelates seeking full recognition as imperial Estate-members continued to participate in person in the Reichstag, other rulers generally sent trained lawyers to represent their interests. Ever conscious of the expense, many imperial cities entrusted their votes to a single deputy. Yet personal meetings retained great significance at a time when it could take two weeks for a letter from Berlin to Heidelberg. Face to face, lords could discover common interests in hunting or art that bridged years of political and even confessional tension. Even if sharing a religious service or copious quantities of alcohol failed to foster good feeling, the complex imperial constitution offered numerous fora to continue a dialogue.
Rather than force an issue, most preferred temporizing, waiting until passions cooled, or shifting negotiations to a different level in the imperial constitution where there might be more allies or better chances of success. The long process of consultation offered the chance to dodge unwelcome burdens by citing new circumstances that had arisen after talks began, or by delaying agreement by the excuse of needing to consult other parties. Imperial politics was thus a series of formal meetings of rulers and their representatives at irregular intervals, supplemented by lesser assemblies to discuss specific issues, such as currency regulation, or tax quotas. Contact was maintained in between by couriers or informal personal meetings. The large number of relatively weak elements made it difficult for anyone to act alone, discouraging extremism and diluting any agenda to a minimum that all could agree.
This cumbersome process certainly made it difficult for the Empire to act decisively, but it gave it a particular strength that ensured it survived the most prolonged and bloody civil war in its history. The modern democratic state assumes responsibility for implementing decisions once they have been taken by majority vote. The dissenting minority now confront the full power of the state and, if they choose to resist, the situation can descend into violence as there is no legal basis for their failure to comply. No such separation existed in the Empire, because law-making and law enforcement remained common matters for the emperor and the imperial Estates. The minority continued to confront the majority, not the Empire itself. It was as if the process of decision-making was not yet complete and the majority view remained provisional until accepted by the minority. This situation was clearly problematic, as the dissenters could still hope to reverse unwelcome decisions completely, while the majority could grow frustrated if their opinion remained ignored. Constant postponement of controversial issues might render definitive arrangements impossible. However, the chances of violence were greatly reduced as long as a compromise remained possible. Moreover, neither side rejected the Empire that remained the accepted forum in which to reach a decision. Dissenters opposed the interpretation of laws, not the institutions that made or enforced them. Thus, while the Empire’s inhabitants fought over the interpretation of the imperial constitution, they did not dispute its existence and it provided the framework within which they eventually made their peace.
CONFESSIONALIZATION
Religious tension impaired the working of the imperial constitution and contributed to the outbreak of the war in 1618. However, the link was far from straightforward. The sixteenth century was far less violent than much of the Middle Ages that had seen numerous feuds and even emperors deposed by their vassals. To understand the role of religion, we need to know how matters of faith became entwined with disputes over earthly authority, and for this we need to examine the process of forming distinct confessional identities following the Reformation.
All Christian confessions sprang from common roots, but developed a momentum of their own due to vested material interests, social concerns for status and prestige, and the psychological need to belong and to define that belonging by distancing oneself from those holding different views. The theological controversy forced believers to take a stand, leading each principal denomination to stress particular aspects as distinctive. Catholicism emphasized the primacy of organization, with the Roman church as the only competent authority to interpret the word of God for all Christians. Lutherans stressed the primacy of doctrine, claiming to free the Word of God from being misinterpreted by a church that had lost its way. Calvinism stood for the primacy of practice, calling for Luther’s ‘reformation of doctrine’ to be followed by a second ‘reformation of life’, to bring behaviour in line with faith.5
Catholicism
Martin Luther’s initial challenge sprang from wider attempts to renew Catholicism, but his break with Rome forced the papacy to respond politically as well as theologically. The council of cardinals convened at Trent in 1545–63 was intended to heal the rift, but ended by passing judgment on the evangelicals as heretics. Its final decrees concentrated on defining Catholicism and outlining a programme to exterminate heresy by renewing Catholic life. One issue was the Eucharist dispute over Christ’s reference to the bread and the wine at the Last Supper. This assumed such significance because of the centrality of the mass as a collective act of worship, bringing priest and community together. The Council’s decrees affirmed the primacy of the church by stating that the intervention of the priest consecrated the wafers, transforming them into the body of Christ who was then present at the service. Acceptance of this ‘Tridentine mass’ signalled subordination to the pope’s other rulings on doctrine. It was accompanied by a revival of the medieval Eucharist cult, manifest through Corpus Christi processions of the faithful who walked behind religious banners and images on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday to celebrate mass together under the auspices of a cleric.
The Council issued a wide range of decrees to silence Luther’s criticism that the clergy were not up to their role as mediators between God and believers. Education was expanded so that priests understood official doctrine and did not mislead their flocks. Bishops were to serve their dioceses, not exploit them. Carlo Borromeo (1538–84) became the model to follow. He was the first archbishop of Milan for eighty years to reside in the city, regularly visiting his churches and sponsoring religious orders to go out into the community and encourage a more active Christian life. The modern confessional box was his invention, greatly increasing the attraction of confession, which became no longer an act of public shame but an opportunity for individual spiritual guidance. He spearheaded the counter-attack against heresy in Switzerland and soon became the focus of his own cult, leading first to his elevation as cardinal, and then to papal recognition of his sainthood in 1610. The veneration of saints itself became a mark of Tridentine Catholicism, celebrating pious figures not only as role models, but as direct intercessors with God.
Local saints further reinforced religious identity and assisted in Catholicism’s response to evangelical collectivism. Though the liturgy remained in Latin, other aspects of worship were held in the vernacular and were accompanied by music, singing and activities intended to strengthen solidarity. Pilgrimages were revived, especially to the two bleeding heart shrines at Weingarten and Walldürn that survived the Reformation. Their protection, by the duke of Bavaria and elector of Mainz respectively, allowed these princes to demonstrate their Catholic credentials. The number of visitors already reached 10,000 a year in the 1590s, rising to two or three times that by the 1620s and both continued to do good business throughout the war, apart from the three years of Swedish occupation. The Holy Family also assumed greater prominence. The saintly character of Joseph was emphasized, presenting him as the devoted defender and guardian of all Christian families, while the cult of the Madonna reached new heights, particularly with the development of pilgrimage sites at Altötting and Passau along the Danube. Marian confraternities were expanded to admit lay members alongside clergy, furthering the integration of the Catholic church within a community. Membership of that in Cologne grew to 2,000 out of a population of around 45,000 by 1650.
Tridentine reform extended to the very heart of the Catholic church, with reform of the papal curia and expansion of its diplomatic network as the pope responded not simply to Protestantism but to shifts in the European balance of power.6 Spain’s victory over France gave it control of Italian territory either side of the Papal States by 1559, tightening the Habsburg grip on the pontiff who had not forgotten that it had been the emperor’s soldiers, not the Protestant hordes, that had sacked his capital in 1527. The pope recognized that Catholicism needed the Habsburgs as rulers of both Spain and Austria, together with their new overseas empire in the Americas and Indies. He saw himself as padre commune, using his influence to broker reconciliation within the Christian community. But the political situation forced him to work through Catholic rulers, many of whom he suspected of placing dynastic advantage above confession. He looked to France and to the remaining independent Italian rulers as counterweights to Habsburg predominance, and was forced to surrender the initiative to other rulers to advance local Catholic interests.
Protestant propaganda presented the Thirty Years War as a papal crusade, with the Jesuits as the pontiff’s storm troopers. Officially called the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit order had been established by papal decree in 1540 following the initiative of Ignatius Loyola.7 The Jesuits had a clear mission to extirpate Protestantism, which their founder called ‘an epidemic of the soul’. They would first remove the causes of the ‘infection’ by displacing Protestants, and those Catholics who would not cooperate, from positions of influence, and then restore ‘health’ by promoting the vitality of Catholic life and doctrine. These tactics were overtly political and set the Jesuits apart from other Catholic orders, such as the Capuchins who continued the Franciscan tradition of working among ordinary people. Cardinal Borromeo sent them into the Alpine villages, where they worked to restore Catholicism among the Swiss and the Habsburg subjects in the Tirol from the 1580s. By contrast, the Jesuits started at the very top of the political hierarchy, believing that if they won over a territory’s ruler and its elite, gradually the rest of society would follow. Acting on Loyola’s orders, a Jesuit accepted the post of confessor to the king of Portugal in 1552, commencing a policy of actively seeking such positions. Protestants saw this as a papal conspiracy, quickly fitting the confessors into the role of evil advisers exercising disproportionate influence.
Even among Catholics the order aroused hostility. The more traditional orders resented the pushy Jesuits who acquired churches, schools and other assets through their political connections. Many were alarmed by their apparent radicalism. A deranged former Jesuit tried to assassinate Henri IV of France in 1594, while another member defended tyrannicide in a book published five years later, and it was easy to believe they were behind other conspiracies, such as the English Gunpowder Plot of 1605. However, Jesuits had to reconcile their Counter-Reformation mission with their hierarchical world view, and evolved a distinct approach to their role as confessors. They believed that the devil tempted princes to grant concessions to the heretics. If this had occurred, they would reassure the prince that God would forgive him provided such concessions had been politically necessary, and if they were revoked at the first opportunity. Such arguments opened the door to pragmatism where compromise could cloud militancy. It also fitted the varied personalities of the different confessors who were, after all, engaged in a very personal relationship with their prince. The flexible, pragmatic Martin Becan served Emperor Ferdinand II from 1620, but was followed by the militant hardliner William Lamormaini, who remained his confessor until the emperor’s death in 1637. Ferdinand’s son and successor chose Johannes Gans, known for his love of good dinners and more secular lifestyle. Moreover, this unbroken line of confessors was not matched elsewhere in Europe where the order had considerably less influence than in the porous political structure of the Empire.
The order expanded rapidly in the Empire, growing from 50 members out of a total of 1,000 at Loyola’s death in 1556, to 1,600 out of 13,100 worldwide by 1615. Their main task was not that of confessor, but of teacher, since the order’s primary influence stemmed from its role as educator of the lay and clerical elite. There were 22 Jesuit colleges in the Rhineland by the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, as well as another 20 in south Germany and 23 more in Austria and Bohemia by 1630. Enrolment rose dramatically too, with that at Trier leaping from 135 students at its foundation in 1561, to 1,000 by 1577. Colleges provided the basis for an expansion into higher education as the Jesuits persuaded rulers to confer university status, enabling them to recruit students from more prosperous and elevated social backgrounds. Their success attracted attention and they were invited to take over struggling institutions. For example, the humanist colleges of Ingolstadt and Dillingen were both entrusted to them in the mid-sixteenth century, while their activities in Vienna allowed them to take over the university there. This expansion was due to a range of teaching methods that seem obvious today, but were cutting-edge at the time. All Jesuits were university graduates and applied a common curriculum throughout the colleges, combining the existing humanist model of the grammar school with the deeper, systematic study of theology and philosophy. Schooling was open to anyone who could pass the entrance examination, and there were no tuition fees. Pupils were streamed into classes according to ability, enabling progression, while the presence of more than one teacher at each establishment allowed for specialist instruction with regular lesson plans. The educational programme had broad appeal across German society, but those destined for a higher clerical career were often sent on to the order’s Collegium Germanicum, founded in Rome in 1552 and funded by the papacy. Though enrolment declined during the Thirty Years War, the Collegium made a profound impact on the imperial church, providing around a seventh of all cathedral canons during the first half of the seventeenth century. As with the confessors, Jesuit influence through education needs to be set in context. There were other Catholic universities; eight universities were founded in Protestant territories in the century after 1527; and total student numbers across the Empire rose from 2,700 in 1500 to 8,000 by 1618; a figure that was not reached again until the nineteenth century.8
Jesuit influence was also blunted by other traditions within German Catholicism. Secular Catholic rulers were keen to combat heresy, since religious dissent was widely seen as the first step to sedition, but the spread of the Reformation largely confined Catholicism to the imperial church territories. Apart from the Habsburg lands, only Bavaria and Lorraine remained as large Catholic secular principalities by the mid-sixteenth century. Bavaria and the Habsburgs became the order’s principal sponsors within the Empire, since many ecclesiastical princes viewed the Jesuits with suspicion. Though numerous, the ecclesiastical territories were relatively small, and their political institutions were underdeveloped. Government in each territory was largely in the hands of the cathedral or abbey chapter that elected the bishop or abbot. Jurisdiction was fragmented by the presence of other collegiate churches and religious foundations. For example, five collegiate churches in Speyer controlled a quarter of all parishes, while half of the archbishopric of Trier was incorporated in foundations and monasteries beyond the elector’s direct control.9 The Tridentine decrees enhanced bishops’ powers to supervise autonomous foundations and parish clergy, who frequently opposed interference in their affairs. Most of the middle and senior clergy in the Empire associated faith with lifestyle and local interest. This Catholic establishment was closely tied to the noble and patrician elite in their area and shared their worldly, Renaissance humanist outlook. There were long-standing patterns of placing younger sons and unmarried daughters in the imperial church, which provided suitable social status and a comfortable income. As institutions of the Empire, religious foundations and cathedral chapters were woven into the imperial constitution, with their own rights and prerogatives. They exercised political jurisdictions that were local and particular, and clashed with the Jesuits’ allegiance to Rome. Election to an abbey or bishopric depended on membership of the relevant chapter, and the canons preferred candidates who shared their views. Even the model Tridentine bishop Cardinal Borromeo had been ambivalent towards the papacy’s universalist pretensions, and had represented the conciliar tradition of a church governed by its senior clerics that had been smothered by the assertion of papal supremacy at Trent. The political influence associated with the imperial church encouraged its leading clerics to continue the pattern of absenteeism by accumulating benefices and sees wherever possible. Tridentine reforms were implemented only slowly and selectively, making their main impact only in the later seventeenth century, long after the Thirty Years War.
Reforming militancy also met strong opposition on the ground where priests lived as members of the community and were conscious that their position there depended largely on how they were accepted by parishioners. They saw the human face of everyday life that was frequently ignored or misunderstood by militants urging confessional conformity. Doctrine was bent to fit local practices, pragmatic and material interests, contributing to the diversity, as well as the strength of Catholicism within the Empire.
Lutheranism
It was precisely such heterodoxy that the Lutheran Reformation sought to eliminate. Luther wanted to reform the existing church, not create a new one, and only contested papal authority when the pope refused to agree with his interpretation of doctrine. It was the centrality of doctrine to Lutheranism that set it apart from the Roman church and sustained what became a distinct community of believers. Regarding the Bible as the source of all truth, Luther translated it into German to free it from papal misinterpretation. Luther’s followers considered themselves an evangelical movement, only gradually adopting the label ‘Protestant’ that derived from the formal protest by Lutheran princes at the decision of the Catholic majority in the 1529 Reichstag at Speyer to take action against heresy. The dispute forced the Lutherans to define their beliefs in a series of written statements, beginning with the Confession of Augsburg that was delivered to the emperor at the Reichstag meeting in that city in 1530.
The stress on the Word of God direct from the Bible lessened the role of the priest as intermediary, and prompted Luther to reduce the sacraments to only baptism and the Eucharist. On the latter he broadly accepted the Catholic doctrine of real presence, but increased lay participation in the service. Other doctrines were developed in new directions, notably the concept of justification by faith. This separated justification (salvation) from sanctification (good works), arguing that entry to heaven came as a gift from God and could not be earned. An individual was not trapped in a cycle of sin, confession, contrition and penance, since God alone decided who would be saved. The faithful should concentrate on living a good, Christian life, rather than constant preparation for a ‘good death’ through confession, good works or indulgences. These ideas had implications that Luther had not intended. The concept of a priesthood of all believers implicitly challenged the political as well as clerical hierarchy, providing a theological basis for popular radicalism that culminated in the German Peasants War of 1524–6. This attempt to settle a host of local grievances contained a powerful political vision of an Empire without any lords between the emperor and the ‘common man’. Though crushed with considerable brutality by both Protestant and Catholic princes, the rebellion left a lasting impact on the Empire. Rulers agreed to allow ordinary folk to take their grievances to court, thus binding the territories further within the imperial judicial system and strengthening the hierarchical imperial constitution. The experience also fundamentally changed Lutheranism, shifting it in a more conservative direction. Theologians reaffirmed the role of secular authority in supervising both laity and clergy, while enhancing the latter as the guardians of true doctrine.10
Given the fragmentation of political authority within the Empire, this resulted in separate Lutheran church structures in each territory adopting the new faith. The territory’s ruler broke with Rome and assumed the supervisory role previously held by the bishop or archbishop in whose diocese his lands lay. Given the Lutheran distinction between worldly and spiritual matters, these episcopal powers were delegated to two new institutions. Responsibility for spiritual management was entrusted to a consistory staffed by theologians who vetted parish priests according to their conformity with approved doctrine. Each priest was expected to deliver at least two hundred sermons a year, including two each Sunday. Drafts had to be sent to the consistory for approval and hour glasses were set up in churches to ensure parishioners were not short changed. Regular sermons reinforced the community of believers and provided a convenient opportunity for the secular authorities to disseminate their decrees. The confessionalizing drive of Lutheranism could thus dovetail with state social disciplining, each authority seeking obedience, thrift and morality. The new clergy were maintained by confiscating the material assets of the Catholic church that lay within the ruler’s political jurisdiction. This process has been labelled secularization, a rather misleading term, since it did not follow the route taken in the English Reformation where Henry VIII sold monastic land to subsidize state expenditure. Some money was diverted to pay for the princely household or music at court, but otherwise the assets were consolidated as Lutheran ‘church property’ (Kirchengut) and entrusted to a church council that used them to support the territorial church.11 Spiritual practices that had no foundation in Lutheran doctrine were discontinued, such as the ritual of masses for the dead in Catholic convents and monasteries, but other activities that were similar to those undertaken by Catholic foundations, such as poor relief, the provision of hospitals and education, were expanded.
Political leadership from the princes was also necessary to defend Lutheranism within the Empire. Emperor Charles V tried to settle the doctrinal controversy by sponsoring meetings of theologians. Their failure to agree forced him to invoke the public peace legislation since Catholics accused the Protestants of stealing their church’s property and fomenting sedition among their subjects. Charles summoned Luther before the Reichstag at Worms in 1521 to answer the charges brought by the papacy. The emperor’s final judgment was based on his traditional role as defender of the faith; Luther was found guilty of heresy and placed under the imperial ban, the Empire’s highest secular sanction, making him an outlaw and subject to pursuit and punishment under the framework of the public peace.
The spread of Lutheranism among the princes and imperial cities entrenched the schism, shattering the unity of law and religion on which the emperor’s verdict had been based. The Protestants denied the pope’s right to judge doctrine, and claimed their subordination to God superseded the loyalty they owed the emperor. The political story of the Reformation is essentially that of a series of Protestant attempts to postpone or annul Charles’s Edict of Worms from 1521 by mobilizing through the imperial constitution. Though their territories were larger and more populous, Protestants remained outnumbered in imperial institutions by the smaller but more numerous Catholic Estates. Threat of prosecution through the Reichskammergericht forced the elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hessen and other Lutheran princes and cities to form the Schmalkaldic League in 1531, setting a significant precedent of a Protestant defence association outside the constitution. Problems with France and the Ottomans kept the emperor busy until 1546 when he returned to Germany with a large army, defeating the elector of Saxony at the battle of Mühlberg in April 1547. The victory cleared the way for Charles to impose his solution to the Empire’s problems.
The doctrinal dispute was silenced by a compromise statement of faith, known as the Interim since it was considered provisional pending papal approval. Though containing some concessions to Protestantism, the Interim broadly endorsed Catholic interpretation on most points. Meanwhile, the Empire was reorganized to make it easier for the Habsburgs to manage. Burgundy and the Habsburg possessions in Italy were assigned to Spain, where Charles’s son Philip had been designated heir. Austria, Bohemia and Hungary were entrusted to Charles’s brother Ferdinand, while the remaining non-Habsburg imperial Estates were to be brought within a special alliance with the emperor. The Saxon electoral title was taken from the senior Ernestine branch of the Wettin family that had opposed Charles and given to Duke Moritz of the junior Albertine branch who had backed the emperor in the Schmalkaldic War.12
Such a sweeping demonstration of imperial authority was alarming, even to its beneficiaries. Prompted by a mixture of personal and political motives – Charles had refused to release the duke’s father-in-law, the landgrave of Hessen – Moritz conspired to reverse parts of the 1548 settlement. French support was bought by permitting the occupation of the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun on the Empire’s western frontier in February 1552. Charles retreated to Innsbruck as his support in the Empire fell away, leaving his brother Ferdinand to negotiate with the rebels. Ferdinand granted Moritz’s demands in the Peace of Passau in June 1552: confirmation of his electoral title, release of his father-in-law, suspension of the Interim and the assembly of another Reichstag to reach a definitive settlement. Increasingly disillusioned, Charles handed the initiative to his more moderate and pragmatic brother who concluded the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 (see below, p.41). The emperor transferred the imperial government to Ferdinand the following year and retired to Spain. His death two years later split the Habsburgs into Austrian and Spanish branches, with Ferdinand recognized by the electors as the new emperor.
These events represented a deep crisis for German Lutheranism. The controversial role of figures like Moritz of Saxony threatened to discredit the princely leadership of the religious movement. Armed opposition to the emperor threw religious and political loyalties into conflict. The loss of three territories to France was never recognized by the emperor and suggested the dangers of seeking external help to defend religious liberty. More fundamentally, inability to agree political action fuelled disagreements over doctrine. Luther’s death in 1546 coincided with the moment of crisis as his followers faced the stark choice of compromising their core beliefs, or defying the emperor and plunging the Empire into civil war. Pragmatists followed Philipp Melanchthon, who represented the Erasmian humanist strand of Lutheranism that was already prepared to accept peripheral elements of traditional worship in return for recognition within the imperial constitution. Their opponents styled themselves Gnesio Lutherans, after the Greek for ‘real thing’. They insisted on the original 1530 Confession of Augsburg, rejecting the revised ‘Variata’ version prepared ten years later by Melanchthon with Luther’s tacit approval. To them, the Interim represented the first step towards eradication and they inclined to an apocalyptic vision of a final struggle between true Christians and the Antichrist. Their symbol was the city of Magdeburg that defied the Interim until finally taken by imperial troops in November 1552.
These conflicts fragmented both factions. The Gnesio Lutherans purged their more extreme members, generally known as Flacians after the Croatian Matthias Flacius, who was convinced by such things as deformed babies that mankind was physically degrading, portending the end of the world. More orthodox recruits were drawn from younger men who had grown up since the Reformation and were making their careers in the new Lutheran church establishment. They rejected the Philippists’ hope of eventual reconciliation with Catholics, trying instead to convert them. Uncertainty led some Lutherans to drift back to Catholicism, or to embrace more extreme evangelical beliefs. As leader of the evangelical princes, Saxony tried to broker a compromise after 1573. The Saxon court preachers compiled the Book of Concord between 1577 and 1580, which endorsed the Gnesio Lutheran interpretation of their faith, rejecting Flacianism and most of Philippism. Saxony led the drive to sign up the Protestant imperial Estates, securing acceptance of the new statement from twenty princes, thirty other lords and forty cities by 1583.13
Calvinism
Dissenters criticized this imposition of orthodoxy as the ‘Book of Discord’, claiming it sacrificed the Reformation’s potential to truly transform Christian life. Those seeking this ‘second Reformation’ became associated with the theology of the French reformer Jean Calvin, whose ideas spread into Germany after the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The conversion of the elector Palatine around 1560 gave the new movement a considerable boost and helped ensure that, unlike Calvinism elsewhere in Europe, Calvinism in the Empire was led by princes rather than more humble folk. Around twenty counts and minor princes followed the elector’s example by 1618, but the landgrave of Hessen (1603) and the elector of Brandenburg (1613) were the only other important rulers to openly embrace the new faith.
They called themselves the Reformed, since the term Calvinist had connotations of an illegal sect. Their aim was the completion of Luther’s Reformation by eradicating the remnants of ‘papist superstition’ in both ritual and doctrine. The high altar and clerical vestments were banished from churches, while paintings and sculptures were smashed to demonstrate that these cultic objects were powerless. Ministers adopted sober academic dress, appearing as professionals qualified to preach and teach. Long-standing elements of doctrine were rejected, such as exorcism at infant baptism and the concept of real presence during mass – Calvinists abhorred the notion that Christ was physically present since this entailed his body being turned into excrement as the wine and wafers passed through the digestive systems of the congregation. Communion was transformed into a commemorative ceremony, where the parishioners shared a meal round a table, the East Frisians even drinking beer instead of wine.
However, like Luther, Calvin also developed some Catholic ideas in new directions. The most important politically was his emphasis on predestination. This gave his religion its dynamic self-confidence, while fostering seeds of doubt and indecision among some of his followers at the same time. The early Christian church had condemned the view that people could earn eternal reward simply through their own merit and following Christian tenets. St Augustine argued God alone decided salvation and, since this decision occurred prior to birth, some people were predestined as the ‘elect’ to be saved. Calvin rejected this Catholic interpretation, because it implied that God was not powerful enough to save the reprobate, and developed his own doctrine of double predestination where God selected both the elect and the reprobate. He discouraged individual speculation on fate, arguing that believers simply had to trust God since faith would lead them away from sin and towards a life lived according to the Commandments. Yet doubt would not go away, inducing a brittle confidence in many Calvinists that crumbled in the face of adversity as they interpreted personal reverses as signs they were not among the elect.
A new doctrine of living was to accompany these beliefs. Calvin’s reorganization of the Genevan church provided a model that was copied to a varying extent by his followers elsewhere. The princely character of the ‘second Reformation’ in the Empire meant that German Calvinists generally already had a Protestant church structure, because the new faith made its converts from among the Lutherans, rather than the Catholics. Having only recently established a Lutheran church, most converts to Calvinism simply entrusted it with new tasks. A system of mutual monitoring was established, where parishioners and ministers were encouraged to report on each other’s doctrinal conformity and moral standards. This social disciplining element appealed to princes and urban magistrates in the later sixteenth century as they struggled to master problems stemming from inflation, population growth, rising underemployment and poverty. Lutherans and Catholics also intended doctrinal purity to be matched by moral renewal, but the combination of the disciplinary drive with other aspects of Calvinist theology convinced its followers that they were the true inheritors of the early church.
Fundamentalism was reinforced by Calvinism’s international character that saw its followers scattered widely across Europe, nowhere in a majority. Lutherans could draw on the humanist national tradition that associated truth and honesty as true German (Teutsch) characteristics, in contrast with the deviousness of foreigners (Welsch), especially those south of the Alps. The Danes and Swedes shared much of this cultural tradition, and like their German co-religionists, could relate their new Lutheran churches with national defiance of Rome. By contrast, Calvinism took root in individual cities and princely homes, denying it an obvious centre. Each new community looked to established ones elsewhere for guidance and support. As a leading imperial Estate-member, the elector Palatine was the obvious choice for German Calvinists and the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 became the main model within the Empire, displacing the influence of Geneva from the 1580s. Over two hundred Hungarian and five hundred French students attended Heidelberg University between 1560 and 1610, strengthening the Palatinate’s standing among believers elsewhere. The elector also founded the new town of Frankenthal to welcome French Huguenot and Dutch Calvinist refugees fleeing their religious civil wars that broke out in 1562 and 1566 respectively. Accustomed to interpreting contemporary events through biblical examples, Calvinists identified with the Israelites. The common experience of a hard life on the road and finding a home in a new community forged bonds between students and refugees, establishing ties that lasted if individuals returned home or moved elsewhere. Believers saw their own local struggles as part of a wider battle between good and evil, especially as Spanish involvement in the French and Dutch civil wars reinforced the impression that they were confronted by an equally international Catholic conspiracy to thwart the righteous at every turn.
Limits to Confessionalization
The emergence of competing varieties of Christianity by the later sixteenth century suggests a society that was becoming deeply divided by religion. Many aspects of everyday life were becoming confessionalized, erecting invisible barriers between and even within communities. A person’s faith could be discerned from his or her name, with Joseph becoming increasingly popular alongside Maria among Catholics, while Calvinists rejected saints’ names, selecting instead Abraham, Daniel, Zacharias, Rachel, Sarah and others from the Old Testament. Luther’s translation of the Bible spread his Saxon dialect throughout central and parts of northern Germany as the correct written form, while the Jesuit standardization of High German entrenched this in the south. When a territory changed its confessional allegiance, its written language followed suit, and the same has been detected for individual converts, such as the novelist Grimmelshausen, who was raised a Lutheran but adopted Catholicism during the Thirty Years War. Other artistic activity was also partly confessionalized. Calvinists rejected all theatre, while Lutherans used it in schools and the Jesuits in their colleges. Catholic sermons concentrated on the Madonna and the saints, while Lutherans and Calvinists focused on morality.14
Nowhere were the differences more obvious than in time-keeping. Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the date should be set back ten days on 15 October 1582, and henceforth the new year was to start on 1 January, not 25 March, in order to bring the calendar in line with scientific calculations. The Habsburgs and German Catholics adopted the new Gregorian calendar by 1584, but while Protestant scientists like Johannes Kepler favoured reform, their clergy rejected anything from Rome and the credulous believed the papists were trying to steal ten days of their lives. The discrepancy became obvious in the Empire where Lutherans and Catholics lived together officially since the Peace of Augsburg. Nine-tenths of the Augsburg population were Lutherans, but the Peace had made the city formally bi-confessional. After difficult negotiations, the magistrates imposed the new calendar in 1586, but the Protestants continued to observe ‘their’ Sunday and went to services in churches across the frontier.
However, there is considerable evidence that society was not as confessionalized as it was by the early eighteenth century. Mixed marriages and social contact remained fairly common in Augsburg prior to the Swedish occupation in the 1630s. Protestants and Catholics drank together in the same taverns without the court records recording sectarian brawls. Craft hostels became segregated only following the Peace of Westphalia when the magistrates took bi-confessionalism to legal extremes. Evidence from other territories suggests that the citizens of Augsburg were far from alone in their pragmatic approach.15 Some people outwardly conformed while inwardly dissenting. Others selected the beliefs and practices they found most meaningful and useful in their daily lives, regardless of orthodoxy. Traders sought profit over piety and sold to whoever would buy their wares. While it was not possible to escape censorship entirely, political fragmentation in the Empire offered opportunities to disseminate and receive a variety of views.
Perhaps most importantly, fundamentalists of all creeds struggled to stamp distinctive patterns of thought and behaviour on a society that carried a rich pre-Reformation heritage. The humanist educational ideal that spread in the fifteenth century continued to shape schools, universities and literary societies regardless of confession. Though the content of lessons may have varied, the form of instruction at least provided some common ground. Moreover, the wealthy and fortunate continued the tradition of attending several institutions during their studies, often irrespective of their confession. The common veneration of classical forms helped elevate the exchange of ideas above sectarian strife, and even during the war the emperor chose Protestants as imperial poets laureate.16 Humanism also offered the example of Erasmus who pursued a more private faith, free of clerical supervision. Both Emperor Ferdinand I and his successor Maximilian II sponsored humanist scholars who sought common elements among the confessions as a basis for reuniting Christians. The descent of France and the Netherlands into sectarian violence at a time when the Empire was enjoying peace provided further pause for thought, notably after the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572 when Catholics slaughtered an aristocratic Huguenot wedding party in Paris. The emperor’s key military adviser, Lazarus von Schwendi, wrote that such violence would impair the Empire’s ability to fight the Ottomans who represented a threat to all Christians. His proposals for toleration suggest an approach similar to the politique position in France that sought peace by placing loyalty to a strong monarchy above confessional interest. However, there were others who went further. The imperial treasurer, Zacharias Geizkofler, readily identifiable as a Protestant from his forename, argued that secular authority had no right to dictate matters of conscience and that toleration should stem from mutual understanding, not political expediency.
While Geizkofler was in a minority, it is clear that sixteenth-century Europeans inhabited multiple mental worlds simultaneously, accepting different ideas without trying to reconcile them. Things that might appear illogical and incompatible today did not necessarily seem so at the time. Militancy was certainly growing, particularly as those who had only known a confessionally divided world reached maturity and positions of influence around 1580. But it is impossible to ascribe the outbreak of war in 1618 directly to such sentiment. In order to appreciate the connection between religion and the war, we need to review the Religious Peace of Augsburg and investigate how confessional differences became intertwined with constitutional disputes.
RELIGION AND IMPERIAL LAW
The Peace of Augsburg 1555
The agreement of 1555 has entered Anglophone historical writing as the Religious Peace, but in fact the section on confessional differences formed only a small part of a wide-ranging reform package agreed by the Reichstag.17 The religious settlement was thus brought within wider constitutional reforms adjusting the public peace, revising imperial tax quotas, and providing new regulations on currency, policing and the operation of the Reichskammergericht. Article 29 obliged the emperor to accept the religious terms as part of the Empire’s fundamental laws and Ferdinand confirmed this when he became emperor in 1558.
Unlike 1548, pacification of the Empire was not linked to a statement on doctrine. None of the so-called religious articles actually defined faith. Instead, they sought to bring adherents of two opposing confessions within the same legal framework. The difficulties this entailed were to be a root cause of major war after 1618, but responsibility for the outbreak of that conflict cannot be laid upon those who drafted the peace of 1555. They were faced with piecing together the shattered medieval unity of law and faith. The two were considered indivisible because religion provided the guide for all human endeavour: since there could be only one truth, there could be only one law. But now Catholics and Lutherans both claimed to be right. The public peace obliged all imperial Estates to forswear violence and the inconclusive fighting of 1546–52 indicated the impossibility of re-establishing unity by force of arms.
A fully secular Pax Civilis was not an option for the Empire as a whole. This solution was advocated two decades later by the French lawyer Jean Bodin in response to his own country’s civil war; the state was still envisaged as broadly Christian, but disassociated from any particular confession, using its power to preserve religious plurality and domestic order. Such a powerful secular monarchy was incompatible with both German Freedom and the emperor’s Holy Roman credentials.
Instead, the peace-makers of 1555 deliberately blurred the religious distinctions to maintain an element of the old universal ideal of a single Christendom. Lutherans were referred to as ‘adherents of the Confession of Augsburg’, without defining what that meant, while use of words like ‘peace’, ‘religious belief’ and ‘reformation’ were a deliberate attempt to incorporate values that all still shared, yet understood differently. For Lutherans, ‘reformation’ meant the right of legally constituted authorities to change religious practice in line with their founder’s teachings. To Catholics, it confirmed their church’s role in spiritual guidance.
These ambiguities were carried over into the confessional element of the settlement. While France, Spain and the Dutch were still fighting to achieve victory for a single confession in their domains, the Empire agreed to recognize both Catholicism and Lutheranism at its territorial level. Contrary to the later impression, this did not leave the princes entirely free to choose between the two faiths. The formula ‘he who rules, decides the religion’ (cuius regio, eius religio) was not included in the text and emerged in debates about the treaty only after 1586. Rather than allowing perpetual change, the intention was to fix matters as they were mid-century. Various articles were interpreted collectively as the right of reformation (jus reformandi), but this was meant to acknowledge territorial rulers’ duties as secular guardians of religion in their own lands, rather than unilateral powers to change things on a whim. Other articles placed severe restrictions on the right of reformation, notably Article 19 that fixed the Peace of Passau and 1552 as the normative year (anno normali). Duke Moritz had secured Ferdinand’s recognition that the Lutherans could retain those Catholic assets they had incorporated into their territorial churches by that date, and this was now accepted in the general peace. To reconcile Catholics, Ferdinand inserted Article 18 against Lutheran protests, stipulating that rulers of the remaining Catholic ecclesiastical territories that embraced the new faith after 1555 had to stand down. Known as the ‘ecclesiastical reservation’, this article safeguarded the Catholic character of the imperial church and with it the in-built Catholic majority in imperial institutions, thus preserving the Holy Roman element of the Empire. Similarly, the imperial knights were denied the right of reformation, since they were not full imperial Estate-members, while the faith of the imperial cities was fixed permanently, including eight that were to remain bi-confessional.
Other articles were concerned to minimize friction between the two confessions, such as suspending the jurisdiction of Catholic bishops over Lutheran territories, forbidding the use of heresy laws against them and obliging both parties to submit any disputes to arbitration through the Reichskammergericht. The latter provision embedded the religious settlement within the secular framework of the imperial public peace. The inclusion of the right to emigrate (jus emigrandi) represented a further secular intrusion that curbed the princes’ powers of reformation. Subjects who dissented were free to leave without being fined or losing their property. This innovation pointed towards the later philosophy that individual freedoms should take precedence over collective, corporate rights. It suggested a freedom of conscience for which the Protestants had lobbied in the hope of protecting their followers living in Catholic territories. Catholic objections reduced this to the right to emigrate, but Ferdinand nonetheless issued a separate declaration, dated 24 September like the Peace, conceding limited freedom of conscience to existing Lutheran nobles and burghers in the ecclesiastical territories.
The Peace was clearly ambiguous and contradictory, but it would be wrong to conclude with Geoffrey Parker that it merely ‘put a temporary end to open confessional warfare in Germany’.18 No major war occurred for another 63 years and even where Central Europeans did come to blows after 1583, their disputes remained localized and largely free of the brutality that accompanied the prolonged violence in France and the Netherlands. Schwendi’s fear of the Ottomans points to one reason preserving the peace, though the Turkish menace spilled over into major war only after 1593 at a time when confessional tensions were growing, rather than receding. The primary factor behind the Peace’s longevity was its comparatively satisfactory settlement of the religious and political difficulties. Its strength can be seen by the fact that it provided the basis for the internal settlement of the Empire at the Peace of Westphalia that modified rather than replaced it.
The Three Dubia
The real cause of later troubles is to be found in the diverging interpretation of three key terms. The first and most important of these Dubia or uncertainties concerned the fate of the immediate ecclesiastical lands of the imperial church. As recognized imperial Estates, the territories of the archbishops, bishops and prelates had largely escaped incorporation into Lutheran territorial church property prior to 1552. The electors of Brandenburg and Saxony were on their way to incorporating three bishoprics apiece, but this stemmed from long-term territorial ambitions pre-dating the Reformation. The more immediate threat had come from the Catholics. Charles V himself annexed Utrecht and asserted protectorates over other bishoprics close to his existing territory, while France had seized Metz, Toul and Verdun. Overall losses were relatively small, considering that the imperial church still encompassed three electorates, around forty prince-archbishoprics and bishoprics, as well as about eighty abbeys and convents. The Catholic character of these lands was protected by the ecclesiastical reservation, but Ferdinand’s separate declaration permitted nobles in such territories to practise Lutheranism. Protestant penetration of the cathedral chapters thus continued, especially since Lutheran princes and nobles were not prepared to abandon the social and political advantages to be gained through service in the imperial church. The fact that Luther had been prepared to accept the idea of Protestant bishops by the 1540s provided theological underpinning for these ambitions.19 Lutherans argued that the ecclesiastical reservation was not part of the Peace, since they had objected to it, and did not preclude a cathedral chapter electing a Protestant bishop.
The emperor dodged the issue by recognizing Protestants as administrators rather than bishops. The territories remained parts of the imperial church and their rulers exercised their rights as princes, rather than clerics. This prevented complete secularization and preserved the possibility that the next election would secure a return to Catholicism. It also suited the Protestants who had no desire to annex these lands outright, because that could extinguish their distinct representation in imperial institutions, as indeed occurred with the three bishoprics that Brandenburg incorporated during the sixteenth century. Matters only became pressing after 1582 because the number of ecclesiastical territories falling under Protestant administration began to threaten the Catholic majority in the Reichstag and other institutions (see Chapter 7).
The second area of uncertainty concerned the mediate ecclesiastical property that lay within the jurisdiction of a Lutheran ruler, but had not been incorporated into his territorial church property by 1552. The status of such foundations had often been disputed prior to the Reformation as secular rulers claimed the right to protect particular religious houses, or shared rights and revenues with them. It was sometimes unclear whether a particular monastery was mediate, or in fact an imperial Estate – a status that some abbots in southern Germany claimed when threatened with incorporation in Württemberg and other Lutheran lands. Rulers who converted after 1555 faced even greater difficulties, but could still point to the terms of the Peace suspending the jurisdiction of Catholic bishops across Lutheran lands as a basis to supervise ecclesiastical property in their territories.
Subjects’ religious freedoms constituted the third contentious issue. There were more Catholic territories with Lutheran minorities than the reverse. Unsurprisingly, Catholics claimed the terms as an exclusive prerogative of rulers to expel dissenters, whereas Lutherans interpreted them as voluntary freedoms, allowing their co-religionists to continue their worship or emigrate as they chose. The question grew more pressing after the 1570s as Catholic rulers sought to stem the spread of Lutheranism in their territories by making religious conformity a benchmark of political loyalty (see Chapter 3, pp.64–75).
Discussion of the Dubia filled imperial politics from the 1560s, with Catholics and Lutherans presenting each Reichstag with lengthy Gravamina, or legal arguments defending their interpretation of the Peace. All three Dubia touched material and personal interests, but the complex arguments obscured the fundamental underlying problem: the Peace had given Lutherans legal equality, but left Catholics with a political majority. This was crucial, because the imperial judicial system could neither be disentangled from the political structure nor was it able to fulfil the expectation of 1555 and resolve all religious disputes. The supreme court’s inability to do this raised the constitutional question as to where ultimate authority lay. No one wanted matters referred to the pope, since even the Catholics contested his legal and political jurisdiction over the Empire. The concept of German Freedom made any approach to the emperor difficult. He was regarded as an adjudicator, rather than lawgiver. The most contested parts of the 1555 Peace – the ecclesiastical reservation and Ferdinand’s declaration – were attacked by their opponents as arbitrary imperial fiats rather than binding agreements freely negotiated by all parties in the Reichstag. The emperor’s ability to smooth over such disagreements depended largely on his standing among the princes. Both Ferdinand I and Maximilian II worked hard to foster a moderate common ground, but the erratic Rudolf II allowed this to be eroded after his accession in 1576.20
Distinct Protestant and Catholic positions on all disputed points emerged fairly early on and people were already well aware of the ambiguities when the Peace was first concluded. There is little basis then for the standard interpretation of the period 1559–1618 of steadily polarizing opinion. Instead, moderate and militant perspectives coexisted on both sides, with one or other current growing stronger depending on the particular interplay of personalities and wider circumstances. The chronology of these shifts will be picked up in a later chapter; the remainder of this one outlines the opposing views.
Catholic Opinion
The Catholic position on the Dubia was set out in 1566 by Pope Pius V who interpreted the Peace as a tactical concession; the lesser evil of toleration, to avoid a greater evil of religious civil war at a time when the Ottomans were baying outside Christendom’s eastern bulwark. This perspective was repeated by Catholic commentators, including Pope Pius XII on the anniversary of the Peace in 1955. However, this position was open to both moderate and militant interpretations. The former saw the Peace as a fixed concession that left the Lutherans as a dissenting minority within a common legal framework with their Catholic neighbours. They were to be tolerated for the greater good, but were not fully equal and so could not be given additional political rights. Many moderates went further in asserting that 1555 simply set limits to Lutheranism, while allowing those who saw the error of their ways to return to the true faith. Change was possible, but only in one direction. Militants drew on the Jesuit interpretation of the doctrine of the lesser evil to argue that 1555 had merely suspended the original ban on Luther and his followers pronounced in 1521. They derived some support for this interpretation from Article 25 that stated the Peace was to last only until the theologians could resolve their differences. To Catholics, these matters had already been settled by the Tridentine Decrees of 1564, casting doubt on the continued legality of the 1555 treaty. Thus, both moderates and militants found support in imperial law for their claims that they were simply stating the ‘clear letter’ (klare Buchstabe) of the Peace.
Protestant Resistance Theories
Protestants also based their position on the Peace and likewise clung to the hope that Christendom would be preserved and the schism would be only temporary. However, to them 1555 represented the start, not the limit of the project to convince all Christians to embrace Luther’s reform. Calvinists believed they should be included too, since their faith had sprung from the Confession of Augsburg. Opinion divided when confronted with Catholic refusals to countenance what they regarded as infringements of 1555, with militants being far more likely than moderates to consider constitutional change and even resistance.
The idea of resistance existed in Catholic thought, but assumed greater significance for Protestants since they were the political minority in both the Empire as a whole and in the Habsburg lands, where Lutheran nobles and towns opposed a dynasty solidly behind the old church. As in the case of confessional tension, it is important not to interpret the discussion of resistance as a process of radicalization, nor to see Calvinists as necessarily more ready to rebel than Lutherans. The history of political ideas is often distorted by teleology that implies the originators of key ideas were far more influential at the time than their more mainstream contemporaries.21 French and Dutch resistance theories were partially discredited by the violence of their civil wars in the later sixteenth century, prompting Germans to draw mainly on their own experience in the first half of the century, as well as ideas from Hungary and Poland where the nobility had a strong tradition of opposing tyranny.
Any theory of resistance encountered the same three questions that were posed by the use of force in the international arena. War or rebellion had to be considered just if those shedding blood were to reconcile their actions with Christian commandments and so avoid damnation. A just war could be waged only by a recognized authority, but it was unclear who this was when it came to rebellion. Likewise, what constituted a just cause for resistance, and did it extend to defence of temporal as well as religious rights? Finally, it was unclear whether resistance should simply combat injustice or overthrow its perpetrators.
All theologians stressed obedience, arguing that secular authority was divinely ordained and tyrannical rule should be endured as a test of faith. Calvin even urged Christians in the Ottoman empire to obey the sultan. Blanket approval of authority crumbled when the fate of the true church appeared at stake. Already in 1524, some Protestants borrowed the classical model of the lesser magistrates, such as the Spartan ephores and the Roman tribunes, who safeguarded subjects’ liberties against a potentially tyrannical sovereign. Luther reluctantly accepted the princes as the Empire’s ephores when called upon to endorse the Schmalkaldic League. This was particularly welcome for the League’s founders, conscious that the theological claim that duty to God superseded temporal loyalty was dangerously close to the arguments advanced by the rebellious peasants they had crushed in 1524–6. Since the princes were hereditary rulers, Luther accepted them as divinely ordained, whereas the emperor was merely elected by them. People must obey the princes, but the princes could oppose the emperor if he disregarded the true faith. Such arguments chimed with the language of German Freedom that saw the electors and princes as collectively responsible for the Empire’s welfare, thus reconciling opposition to an individual emperor with continued loyalty to the imperial constitution.
Most Lutherans rapidly distanced themselves from these views after the experience of 1546–52, while the acceptance of their faith in the Peace of 1555 made resistance less pressing. The spread of Calvinism also lessened hostility to the emperor, since the new faith made most of its converts at the Lutherans’ expense. Loyalty was strengthened by the emperor’s refusal to assist Spain and the Catholic parties in the French and Dutch civil wars. Lutherans rejected the Calvinists’ claim that the Massacre of St Bartholomew represented an attack on all Protestants, arguing the French Huguenots had brought it upon themselves by taking up arms against their king. As the religious minority within a political minority, Calvinists were more inclined to consider extra-constitutional means to defend their interests. Growing Catholic militancy and doubts about Rudolf II’s leadership forced some Lutherans to do the same. Real radicalization followed only because the Habsburgs’ opposition to Protestantism among their own subjects convinced some that the right of resistance also extended to nobles and even burghers facing persecution.