Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (22 page)

Economic arguments and liberal ideas associated with the Enlightenment are usually used to explain the improving conditions leading to nineteenth-century emancipation. This links the standard narrative of progress to the centralized state, exemplified in central Europe by Prussia and Austria. Both these lands were largely outside the web of imperial laws by the late eighteenth century, so we would expect the position of Jews there to be better than in the more politically fragmented areas of the Empire. This was not the case. The situation in the Habsburg monarchy was not always favourable prior to the 1781
toleration edict, and in 1745 the Ottoman sultan lodged a formal protest at Empress Maria Theresa’s treatment of the Bohemian Jews.
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Frederick William I forced Prussia’s Jews to pay a new tax in 1714 in return for dropping requirements to make them wear a distinctive red hat. The Berlin court printer circumvented the imperial censor to publish Johannes Andreas Eisenmenger’s
Jewishness Revealed
, the first modern anti-Semitic book that was banned in the Empire, but it now appeared from a press supposedly based in the Prussian town of Königsberg beyond the imperial frontier. The brilliant Jewish intellectual, Moses Mendelssohn, visiting Berlin in 1776, was made to pay a head tax fixed at the rate levied on cattle passing the main city gate in a deliberate effort to ridicule him. His treatment reveals the hollowness of Frederick II of Prussia’s much-celebrated toleration.
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Legal protection for Jews could still fail elsewhere in the Empire, as exemplified by the notorious show trial and execution of the financier Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who was made the scapegoat for discredited government policies in Württemberg in 1738.
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However, the authorities had a vested interest in upholding protection, since their own privileges and status were at risk if they failed to do so.
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The contrast with other parts of Europe is perhaps best illustrated by one final case. Prince de Rohan fled revolution in his homeland of France by moving to his German properties at Ettenheim in 1790, where he evicted several Jewish families to make room for his courtiers. The families promptly obtained redress from the Reichskammergericht.
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REFORMATIONS

The Reformation in the Context of Imperial History

The Jews formed the Empire’s only religious minority between the decline of paganism amongst the Slavic populations around 1200 and the emergence of Hussitism over two centuries later. The most significant challenge to conformity came with the Reformation after 1517.
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The Reformation’s uneven outcome reinforced the political and cultural distinctions between the Empire’s primary territorial components, including the drift of Switzerland and the Netherlands towards independence.

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

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

The Problem of Authority

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

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

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

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

A Lost Opportunity?

The controversy surrounding the decisions of 1521–4 persisted into the nineteenth century. Protestant German nationalists condemned what they regarded as a lost opportunity to embrace their faith as a truly ‘German’ religion, thereby forging the Empire as a nation state.
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This ‘failure’ was often woven into explanations of later German woes: the country was supposedly left divided, hindering unification under Bismarck, who regarded Catholics as disloyal after 1871, because of their continued religious allegiance to Rome. These charges rest on a partisan, Protestant reading of history and the self-identification of that faith as inherently ‘German’, as well as a gross oversimplification of the situation facing people in the sixteenth-century Empire – that is, a supposedly simple choice between Catholicism and Protestantism. The vast majority hoped the controversy could be resolved without shattering Christian unity. Wholehearted support for Luther made little political sense for Charles V, regardless of his own fairly conservative views on faith. Ruling the birthplace of the Reformation, Charles confronted evangelism when it appeared indelibly associated with political subversion and challenges to the socio-economic order, and before it had acquired the theological and institutional footing making it acceptable later in other countries such as England. Charles’s imperial title was tied to a universal, not a national, church, and it remained inconceivable, both to himself and to many of his subjects, that he should not follow the same faith as the pope.
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These considerations help explain why the Empire did not adopt what became the general western European solution to the religious controversy of imposing a monarchical civil peace. This entailed the ruler deciding on a single official faith enshrined in a written statement prepared by his theologians (as, for example, in England), or through publicly defending Catholicism. Regardless of the precise theology, this produced a ‘confessional state’ with a single, established church allied institutionally and politically to the crown.
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Toleration of dissenters was a matter of political expediency, granted when the monarchy was weak, as in the case of late sixteenth-century France, or where the
official church remained opposed by a significant minority, as in England. Either way, dissenters depended on special royal dispensations which could be curtailed, or revoked, unilaterally, as the French Huguenots discovered in 1685. Toleration might be widened incrementally through further dispensations, like the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) in Britain, but a privileged, established church remained. Few countries have ever gone as far as the French Republic, which separated church and state in 1905, establishing a modern, secular peace treating all faiths equally provided their followers do not transgress state laws.

Secularization

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

Once all parties had agreed by 1526 that matters should be settled by the ‘proper authorities’ rather than the ‘common man’, two core issues remained. One involved the question of spiritual jurisdiction, since this determined the authority to direct the religious belief and practices of ordinary folk in specific areas. The other concerned the management of clergy and church assets like buildings, property and revenue streams. These had always been important issues in imperial history. The Ottonians had already revoked donations and transferred land to secular lords. This process accelerated after 1100 as the emperor needed more resources to compensate nobles for their military expenses. Meanwhile, secular lords curtailed or usurped the secular jurisdictions of their ecclesiastical neighbours, removing them as imperial Estates, but not as functioning Catholic institutions. This continued beyond the Reformation as the archbishop of Salzburg incorporated the possessions of the bishops of Gurk, Seckau and Lavant. Charles V himself bought the secular jurisdiction of the bishop of Utrecht in 1528, and in 1533 would have accepted a similar offer from the archbishop of Bremen if the pope had not objected. However, secularization in these
cases mostly involved smaller properties, and rarely threatened spiritual jurisdiction.
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The evangelical movement posed an entirely new challenge through its objection to papal jurisdiction and its rejection of good works and prayer for the dead as justifying monasticism. Georg the Pious of Ansbach-Kulmbach did sequestrate religious houses in 1529 and then sell them to fund road and fortress construction in a move prefiguring Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–40). However, this was exceptional in the Empire, where ‘secularization’ generally meant a change of public use. Church assets were placed in public trusts by reform-minded princes and used to fund a more numerous and better-educated clergy, evangelize by teaching the population to read the Bible, and improve welfare through hospitals and poor relief. For example, the duke of Württemberg converted 13 monasteries into schools to train pastors in 1556.
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Conflict was not always inevitable. The complexity of legal and property rights in the Empire prevented a clear demarcation of jurisdiction and ownership, necessitating fairly frequent discussion between the different authorities. These discussions often continued despite religious animosities.
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However, many Catholics regarded the evangelicals’ re-designation of church property and use of spiritual jurisdictions as robbery breaching the public peace, and opened the so-called ‘religious cases’ in the imperial courts.
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