Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (23 page)

Becoming Protestants

The problem fell to Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand I, who was left to oversee the Empire during the emperor’s prolonged absences after 1522. Ferdinand had inherited Hungary in 1526 amidst an Ottoman invasion. This existential threat to the Empire encouraged the imperial Estates to avoid matters that might escalate to civil war. The 1526 Reichstag at Speyer tried to uphold the Burgos edict by allowing imperial Estates to act according to their consciences until the papal-chaired church council ruled on doctrine. The decision essentially settled the question of authority by identifying the imperial Estates as responsible for religious affairs in their own territories. Electoral Saxony, Hessen, Lüneburg, Ansbach and Anhalt now followed the example of some imperial cities two years earlier and began converting church assets and jurisdictions to serve evangelical objectives. These decisions
were influenced by the personal convictions of princes, the location of their lands, regional influence, and their relations to the Empire and papacy. For instance, thanks to its earlier concordats, Bavaria already enjoyed considerable control over the church on its territory and had little incentive to break with Rome.
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Given the long history of secular supervision of church affairs in the Empire, these changes did not automatically identify a territory as evangelical. Several important princes kept arrangements deliberately ambiguous, like the elector of Brandenburg, while religious practices amongst the bulk of the population remained heterodox. The new Lutheran territorial churches issued several revisions to its initial statement of faith, while other reformers like Huldrych Zwingli and Jean Calvin produced their own competing confessions. Similarly, Catholic thought and practice were hardly monolithic, and contained their own reforming impulses, so that we should speak of multiple Reformations.
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The growing divergence was nonetheless clear by the next Reichstag in Speyer in 1529. Catholics disputed the evangelicals’ interpretation of the 1526 meeting as a licence to forge ahead with religious reform. Since the majority of imperial Estates were still Catholic, they reversed the earlier decision and insisted on full enforcement of Charles V’s Edict of Worms banning Luther and his adherents. The ruling prompted the famous
Protestatio
, giving rise to the word ‘Protestant’ as the elector of Saxony led five princes and magistrates from 14 imperial cities in dissenting from the majority. This was the first open breach in the political unity of the Empire.

Failure of the Military Solution

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

Charles held the ‘Armoured Reichstag’ (
Geharnischte Reichstag
) at Augsburg between September 1547 and June 1548 under a strong imperial military presence. Intended to consolidate his victory, this Reichstag represented the only time the emperor attempted to define doctrine by issuing a statement of faith that he hoped would last until the pope’s council, meeting in Trent, passed judgement. Known as the Interim, Charles’s statement offered ‘a new hybrid imperial religion’ incorporating some Protestant elements. Although the Interim was endorsed by the archbishop of Mainz, most Catholics already disavowed it ahead of its promulgation, while Protestants rejected it as an imposition.
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The unsatisfactory settlement was widely resented as a breach of consensus, and Charles was accused of exceeding his authority. Magdeburg’s armed defiance of the Interim galvanized more general opposition across 1551, leading to the Princes Revolt the following year that was backed by France, which had renewed its own war with the Habsburgs. Three months of manoeuvring convinced Ferdinand – who had again been left by Charles to manage the Empire – to agree the Peace of Passau on 31 July 1552. This provided the basis for a general settlement through the mutual renunciation of violence to settle religious disagreements.
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The Peace of Augsburg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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