The Triumph of Christianity (37 page)

Instead, Luther’s Reformation was almost exclusively an urban phenomenon.
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And within the urban context it is widely believed by historians that the Reformation spread rapidly because of its popularity among printers
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and its appeal to students and professors,
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to the urban bourgeoisie,
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and to the nobility.
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Each of these claims will be examined at some length and modified as necessary. But first it seems legitimate to sketch the grievances against the church that prompted many to embrace Lutheranism.

Reform and Discontent

A
S NOTED IN CHAPTER
17, strong forces for reform long existed both within and without the medieval church. But when the Church of Piety lost control of the papacy late in the twelfth century, many of the worst defects not only remained but prospered once again. The most obvious of these was widespread immorality and indolence among the clergy at all levels. Perhaps of greater political significance was the existence of excessive church wealth, privileges, and exactions.

The sins of the clergy, from popes through parish priests, have been sketched at length in several previous chapters. Here it seems sufficient to note the unsuitability of Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–1521), who drove Luther from the church. Born Giovanni de’Medici, the son of the famous patron of the arts and wastrel Lorenzo de’Medici,
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he was the last nonpriest to be elected pope—he was not ordained until a week after his election, was consecrated a bishop two days later, and crowned pope two days after that. Leo fancied himself a humanist and intellectual, but he was most notably “indolent... a spendthrift who squandered more on pageants and gambling than on the needs of the Church.”
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His intense desire for money caused him to launch the aggressive campaigns to sell indulgences that affronted Luther and brought so many princes to Luther’s defense.

For the princes, there need have been no theological objections to the sale of indulgences; it was fully sufficient that their sale caused the flow of large amounts of wealth from their subjects and off to Rome. In addition, the church was by far the richest and largest landowner in Europe. It is estimated that in 1522 the church owned half of the wealth in Germany, perhaps a fifth in France, and about a third in Italy. In Zurich in 1467, church groups held a third of all property, and similar proportions belonged to the church in many other cities.
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The church usually paid no local taxes on any of its properties. In addition, the church enjoyed a huge cash flow by imposing tithes on everyone from peasants to kings in much of Europe. In contrast, the clergy and members of religious orders were exempted from all local taxes (including sales taxes on liquor) and could not be tried in local, secular courts, even for murder. Instead, they could only be tried in church courts which were notorious for imposing very lenient sentences.

Pamphlets and Printers

L
UTHER’S
R
EFORMATION WAS THE
first social movement for which printed materials played an important role—the printing press was only just coming of age. Luther produced many pamphlets (often only four to six pages long) outlining his various disagreements with Rome, each written in vernacular German, and printers across Germany (as well as in other parts of Europe) pumped out copies because, although they were very cheap, they sold by the wagon load. Between 1517 and 1520, Luther turned out thirty pamphlets and short essays. These were published by more than twenty printing firms and it is estimated that altogether they sold more than three hundred thousand copies.
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In 1522, Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German appeared, and it “sold even more widely than any of Luther’s other writings.”
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Keep in mind that copyrights didn’t exist in this era and that printers produced their own editions of anything they thought would sell—Luther protested when other printers rushed out his New Testament before the printer in Wittenberg had sold out his copies. However, it was the existence of aggressive local printers that spread Lutheran materials so widely and quickly. In most of the rest of Europe there were printers only in the largest cities, but in Germany there were printers even in many of the smaller towns. Hence, in Germany, books and pamphlets did not need to be transported long distances—most of Luther’s writings were available locally as soon as the enterprising printer had obtained a copy elsewhere. In one famous incident, a copy of one of Luther’s tracts was stolen from the printer’s shop in Wittenberg and appeared in print in Nuremberg before the Wittenberg edition came out.
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In addition, it is generally believed that printers were eager to produce Lutheran materials not only because they sold so well, but also because the great majority of printers supported Luther.
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Connections between printers, printing, and the Reformation have been well-tested in a remarkable new study by Hyojoung Kim and Steven Pfaff.
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These young sociologists assembled data for each German town having a population of two thousand or more in 1520. Their goal was to test explanations of the success of the Reformation by seeing what factors determined which of these 461 towns turned Lutheran and which remained Catholic, using as their measure whether and when each town officially outlawed saying the Catholic mass. This measure overcomes all ambiguities and is well-documented. Notice too that there was no aspect of religious freedom involved in Luther’s Reformation. What took place was a switch from one monopoly church to another.

Kim and Pfaff were able to study many key aspects of Luther’s Reformation because they were able to assemble detailed information on each town, as will be seen. One of these facts was whether or not there was a local printer and whether this printer had produced an edition of Luther’s Bible. Consistent with an immense historical literature, they hypothesized that towns with printers who had published Luther’s Bible were more likely to turn Lutheran. And the results? Not so! During the early days of the Reformation, there was no correlation between printers of Lutheran Bibles and turning Lutheran; in later days the correlation is negative—towns where Luther’s Bible was printed were significantly
less
likely to have turned Lutheran! This suggests that printers churned out Lutheran literature because it was so profitable, not necessarily because they agreed with it. In fact, that is precisely what Luther and many of his fellow Reformers believed. They often complained that the printers were merely profiteering from their work, and Luther denounced printers as “sordid mercenaries.”
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Professors and Students

T
HE
R
EFORMATION BEGAN AT
the University of Wittenberg. As the distinguished Paul Grendler put it, “The activities of the first four or five years of the Lutheran Reformation resembled a young faculty uprising.”
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As word of Luther’s activities spread, enrollment at Wittenberg nearly doubled by 1520 and soon it was the largest university in Germany. Most students attended Luther’s theological lectures and nearly all of them heard Philipp Melanchthon
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(1497–1560)—Luther’s confidant and ally. Moreover, after completing their studies at Wittenberg, most students went home where they devoted themselves to spreading the Reformation. Nor was it only at Wittenberg that students were recruited as Reformation activists. Lutheranism attracted strong support in many other universities as well, especially at the University of Basel. In addition to taking the Reformation home with them, many students soon also became professors of theology and began to train more activists. A study of prominent leaders of the Reformation found that nearly all of them were, or had been, university professors.
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It turns out, however, that this is a very one-sided and misleading view of the connection between academia and the Reformation. Many other universities were hotbeds of anti-Lutheran, orthodox Catholicism—the University of Cologne came to be called the “German Rome,” and the University of Louvain was equally anti-Lutheran. Students from these universities also went home and there they served as staunch defenders of the church.

Apparently universities, at least in Germany, keep their records forever. Not only do records remain for each student who enrolled in the sixteenth century, but the enrollment lists for specific classes, including those taught by Luther, can be reconstructed. In addition, student records include their home towns. For their set of 461 towns and cities, Kim and Pfaff were able to identify the number of residents who were enrolled in Wittenberg and in Basel during the years 1517 through 1522. They also identified the number who attended Cologne and Louvain. Finally, they created a measure of the total number of students from a town or city who enrolled in any university.

The results are compelling. The rate at which a town’s young people went off to a university had no impact whatsoever on whether the town turned Lutheran or stayed Catholic. But if the larger proportion of students had gone off to Wittenberg or Basel, the city or town had a high probability of becoming Lutheran. Conversely, where enrollments in Cologne and Louvain predominated, the probability was that the town or city remained Catholic. Finally, university towns were more likely to remain Catholic than were towns and cities lacking a university. Despite the prominence of students and faculty in the Lutheran movement, universities tended to be conservative in the sense of upholding traditions. This also helps explain the negative correlation between printers and Lutheranism—university cities all had active presses.

Responsive City Governance

T
HE BACKBONE OF THE
Lutheran Reformation was provided by the urban bourgeoisie: the merchants, bankers, lawyers, physicians, manufacturers, schoolmasters, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats, as well as members of the highly skilled guilds, such as printers and glass blowers, and many local priests. This does not mean, of course, that all or nearly all of the members of these groups favored Luther. It merely means that most of Luther’s support came from these groups. That this was the base of Lutheran recruitment is well known,
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and made obvious by the importance of the printed word for the spread of Lutheranism in an era of mass illiteracy—it is estimated that in 1500 only 3 to 4 percent of Germans could read.
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What made these urban supporters so effective lay in the fact that in much of Germany, many towns and cities had sufficient autonomy so that they could opt to make Lutheranism the only lawful faith without suffering outside interference—at least not until the Wars of Religion began.

Towns and cities with substantial local political autonomy were known as “Free Imperial Cities,” of which there were about sixty-five.
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These cities owed no allegiance to local princes, but only to the Holy Roman Emperor, which is why they were called Imperial Cities. These cities paid their taxes directly to the emperor and remained in complete control of their own tax systems as well as their internal affairs. Some of these Imperial “Cities” can be ignored because they were tiny, having no more than a thousand residents.
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A few had far less political freedom than the others because they were situated in a powerful duchy or principality and this imposed some degree of caution on the city fathers lest they provoke outside interference. But most of the Free Imperial Cities were located in the area along the Rhine known as the “Borderlands” where there were no large governmental units and thus very little threat of external interference. Fortunately for purposes of research, there were a number of other cities in this Borderland area that were similar in size and economy, but that were not Free Imperial Cities. Some of these cities were ruled by a prince bishop, others by a nearby prince, but in either case the local laity had very little authority.

To test the hypothesis that where the local bourgeoisie were in control, Lutheranism was far more likely to have been adopted, I collected information on all forty-three significant Free Imperial Cities and the twelve other cities that were located in the Borderlands. Of the Free Imperial Cities, nearly two-thirds (61 percent) became Protestant, while three-fourths (75 percent) of the non-Imperial Cities remained Catholic.
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Using a slightly different set of cities, Kim and Pfaff found very similar results. Hence local political autonomy played an important role in the success of Luther’s Reformation. But so did autocracy. Aside from the cities, many larger political units ruled by strong princes or kings turned Protestant too.

Royal Self-Interest

W
E COME NOW TO
an apparent contradiction about the spread of Luther’s Reformation. In most of Europe, the decision to embrace Lutheranism or to remain steadfastly within the church was made by an autocratic ruler—a king or a prince. Nearly without exception the autocrats opted for Lutheranism in places where the Catholic Church had the
greatest
local power, and chose to remain Catholic in places where the church was extremely weak! To see why things turned out this way, it will be useful to contrast France and Spain, on the one hand, with Denmark and Sweden, on the other.

Beginning in 1296 when King Philip of France successfully imposed a tax on church income, papal authority steadily eroded in France. In 1516, the subordination of the church to the French monarchy was formalized in the Concordat of Bologna signed by Pope Leo X and King Francis I. The king was acknowledged to have the right to appoint all of the higher posts of the church in France: ten archbishops, eighty-two bishops, and every prior, abbot, and abbess of all of the many hundreds of monasteries, abbeys, and convents. This gave the king full control of all church property and income. As the esteemed Owen Chadwick noted, “When he [King Francis] wanted ecclesiastical money, his methods need not even be devious.”
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His appointees simply delivered.