Introduction

Reformation was the 16th-century religious revolution in the Christian Church, which
ended the supremacy of the Pope in Western Christendom and resulted in the
establishment of Protestant Churches. With the Renaissance and the French Revolution
that followed, Reformation completely altered the medieval way of life in Western Europe
and initiated the era of modern history. Although the movement dates from the early 16th
century, when Martin Luther first defied the authority of the Church, the conditions that
led to his revolutionary stand had existed for hundreds of years and had complex
doctrinal, political, economic, and cultural elements.

Conditions preceding Reformation

From the Revival of the Holy Roman Empire by Otto I in 962, Popes and emperors had
been engaged in a continuous contest for supremacy. This conflict had generally resulted
in victory for the papal side, but created bitter antagonism between Rome and the German
Empire; this antagonism increased in the 14th and 15th centuries by the further
development of German nationalist sentiment. Resentment against papal taxation and
against submission to officials of the distant and foreign papacy was manifested in other
countries of Europe. In England, the beginning of the movement toward ultimate
independence from papal jurisdiction greatly reduced the power of the Church to
withdraw land from the control of the civil government, to make appointments to
ecclesiastical offices, and to exercise judicial authority.

The 14th-century English reformer John Wycliffe boldly attacked the papacy itself, striking
at the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, the excessive veneration of saints, and the moral
and intellectual standards of ordained priests. To reach the common people, he translated
the Bible into English and delivered sermons in English, rather than Latin. His teachings
spread to Bohemia, where they found a powerful advocate in the religious reformer Jan
Hus (John Huss). The execution of Huss as a heretic in 1415 led directly to the Hussite
Wars, a violent expression of Bohemian nationalism, suppressed with difficulty by the
combined forces of the Holy Roman emperor and the Pope. The wars were a precursor of
religious civil war in Germany in Luther's time. In France in 1516, a concordat between the
King and the Pope placed the French Church substantially under royal authority. Earlier
concordats with other national monarchies also prepared the way for the rise of
autonomous national Churches.

As early as the 13th century the papacy had become vulnerable to attack because of the
greed, immorality, and ignorance of many of its officials in all ranks of the hierarchy. Vast
tax-free Church possessions, constituting, according to varying estimates, as much as
one-fifth to one-third of the lands of Europe, incited the envy and resentment of the
land-poor peasantry. Church officials recognized the need for reform; ambitious programs
for the reorganization of the entire hierarchy were debated at the Council of Constance
from 1414 to 1418, but no program gained the support of a majority, and no radical
changes were instituted at that time.

Humanism

Humanism, the revival of classical learning and speculative inquiry beginning in the 15th
century in Italy during the early Renaissance, displaced Scholasticism as the principal
philosophy of Western Europe and deprived Church leaders of the monopoly on learning
that they had previously held. Laypersons studied ancient literature, and scholars such as
the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla critically appraised translations of the Bible and other
documents that formed the basis for much of Church dogma and tradition. The invention
of printing with movable metal type greatly increased the circulation of books and spread
new ideas throughout Europe. Humanists outside Italy, applied the new learning to the
evaluation of Church practices and the development of a more accurate knowledge of the
Scriptures. Their scholarly studies laid the basis on which Luther, the French theologian
and religious reformer John Calvin, and other reformers subsequently claimed the Bible
rather than the Church as the source of all religious authority.

Germany and the Lutheran Reformation

Luther initiated the Protestant revolution in Germany in 1517, when he published his 95
theses challenging the theory and practice of indulgences. Papal authorities ordered
Luther to retract and submit to Church authority, but he became more intransigent,
appealing for reform, attacking the sacramental system, and urging that religion rest on
individual faith based on the guidance contained in the Bible. Threatened with
excommunication by the Pope, Luther publicly burned the bull, or papal decree, of
excommunication and with it a volume of canon law. This act of defiance symbolized a
definitive break with the entire system of the Western Church. In an attempt to stem the
tide of revolt, Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, and the German princes assembled in 1521
at the Diet of Worms, and ordered Luther to recant. He refused and was declared an
outlaw. For almost a year he remained in hiding, writing pamphlets expounding his
principles and translating the New Testament into German. Although his writings were
prohibited by imperial edict, they were openly sold and were powerful instruments in
turning the great German cities into centers of Lutheranism.

The reform movement made tremendous strides among the people, and when Luther left
retirement, he returned to his home at Wittenberg as a revolutionary leader. Germany had
become sharply divided along religious and economic lines. Those most interested in
preserving the traditional order, including the emperor, most of the princes, and the higher
clergy, supported the Roman Catholic Church. The North German princes, the lower clergy,
the commercial classes, and large sections of the peasantry, who welcomed change as
offering an opportunity for greater independence in both the religious and economic
spheres, supported Lutheranism. Open warfare between the two factions broke out in
1524 with the beginning of the Peasants' War. The war was an attempt on the part of the
peasants to better their economic lot. Their program, inspired by the teachings of Luther
and couched in religious terms, called for emancipation from a number of the services
traditionally claimed by their clerical and lay landlords. Luther disapproved of the use of
his demands for reform to justify a radical disruption of the existing economy, but in the
interests of a peaceful settlement of the conflict, he urged the landlords to satisfy the
claims of the peasants. He soon turned against the peasants, however, and, in a pamphlet
violently condemned them for resorting to violence.

The peasants were defeated in 1525, but the wedge between Roman Catholics and
Lutherans widened. A degree of compromise was reached at the Diet of Speyer in 1526,
when it was agreed that German princes wishing to practice Lutheranism should be free to
do so. At a second Diet of Speyer, convened three years later, the Roman Catholic majority
abrogated the agreement. The Lutheran minority protested against this action and became
known as Protestants; thus the first Protestants were Lutherans, the term being extended
subsequently to include all the Christian sects that developed from the revolt against
Rome.

In 1530, the German scholar and religious reformer Melanchthon drew up a conciliatory
statement of the Lutheran tenets, known as the Augsburg Confession, which was
submitted to Emperor Charles V and to the Roman Catholic faction. Although it failed to
reconcile the differences between Roman Catholics and Lutherans, it remained the basis of
the new Lutheran Church and creed. Subsequently, a series of wars with France and the
Ottoman Empire prevented Charles V from turning his military forces against the
Lutherans, but in 1546 the emperor was finally free of international commitments; and in
alliance with the Pope and with the aid of Duke Maurice of Saxony, he made war against
the Schmalkaldic League, a defensive association of Protestant princes. The Roman
Catholic forces were successful at first. Later, however, Duke Maurice went over to the
Protestant side, and Charles V was obliged to make peace. The religious civil war ended
with the religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Its terms provided that each of the rulers
of the German states, which numbered about 300, choose between Roman Catholicism and
Lutheranism and enforce the chosen faith upon the ruler's subjects. Lutheranism, by then
the religion of about half the population of Germany, thus finally gained official
recognition, and the ancient concept of the religious unity of a single Christian community
in Western Europe under the supreme authority of the Pope was destroyed.

France

The Reformation in France was initiated early in the 16th century by a group of mystics
and humanists under the leadership of Lefèvre d'Étaples. Like Luther, Lefèvre d'Étaples
studied the Epistles of St. Paul and derived from them a belief in justification by individual
faith alone; he also denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. In 1523 he translated the
entire New Testament into French. At first his writings were well received by Church and
state officials, but as Luther's radical doctrines began to spread into France, Lefèvre
d'Ètaples's work was seen to be similar, and he and his followers were persecuted. Many
leading Protestants fled from France and settled in the republic of Geneva or Switzerland
until strengthened in numbers and philosophy by the Calvinistic reformation in Geneva.
More than 120 pastors trained in Geneva by Calvin returned to France before 1567 to
proselytize for Protestantism. In 1559 delegates from 66 Protestant Churches in France
met at a national synod in Paris to draw up a confession of faith and rule of discipline
based on those practiced at Geneva.

In this way the first national Protestant Church in France was organized; its members were
known as Huguenots. Despite all efforts to suppress them, the Huguenots grew into a
formidable body, and the division of France into Protestant and Roman Catholic factions
led to a generation of civil wars (1562-1598). One of the notorious incidents of this
struggle was the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which a large number of Protestants
perished. Under the Protestant Henry IV, king of France, the Huguenots triumphed for a
short time, but as Paris and more than nine-tenths of the French people remained Roman
Catholic, the king deemed it expedient to become a convert to Roman Catholicism. He
protected his Huguenot adherents, however, by issuing in 1598 the Edict of Nantes, which
granted Protestants a measure of freedom. The edict was revoked in 1685, and
Protestantism was stamped out of the country

England

The English revolt from Rome differed from the revolts in Germany, Switzerland, and
France in two respects. First, England was a compact nation with a strong central
government; therefore, instead of splitting the country into regional factions or parties and
ending in civil war, the revolt was national—the king and Parliament acted together in
transferring to the king the ecclesiastical jurisdiction previously exercised by the Pope.
Second, in the continental countries agitation for religious reform among the people
preceded and caused the political break with the papacy; in England, on the other hand,
the political break came first, as a result of a decision by King Henry VIII to divorce his first
wife, and the change in religious doctrine came afterward in the reigns of King Edward VI
and Queen Elizabeth I. Henry VIII wished to divorce his Roman Catholic wife, Catherine of
Aragón, because the marriage had not produced a male heir and he feared disruption of
his dynasty. His marriage to Catherine, which normally would have been illegal under
ecclesiastical law because she was the widow of his brother, had been allowed only by
special dispensation from the Pope. Henry claimed that the papal dispensation
contravened ecclesiastical law and that the marriage was therefore invalid. The Pope
upheld the validity of the dispensation and refused to annul the marriage. Henry then
requested the opinion of noted reformers and the faculties of the great European
universities.

Eight university faculties supported his claim. Zwingli and the German-Swiss theologian
Johannes Oecolampadius also considered his marriage null, but Luther and Melanchthon
thought it binding. The king followed a course of expediency; he married Anne Boleyn in
1533, and two months later he had the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounce his divorce
from Catherine. Henry was then excommunicated by the Pope, but retaliated in 1534 by
having Parliament pass an act appointing the king and his successors supreme head of the
Church of England, thus establishing an independent national Anglican Church. Further
legislation cut off the Pope's English revenues and ended his political and religious
authority in England. Between 1536 and 1539 the monasteries were suppressed and their
property seized by the king. Henry had no interest in going beyond these changes, which
were motivated principally by political rather than doctrinal considerations. Indeed, to
prevent the spread of Lutheranism, he secured from Parliament in 1539 the severe body of
edicts called the Act of Six Articles, which made it heretical to deny the main theological
tenets of medieval Roman Catholicism. Obedience to the papacy remained a criminal
offense. Consequently, many Lutherans were burned as heretics, and Roman Catholics who
refused to recognize the ecclesiastical supremacy of the king were executed.

Under King Edward VI, the Protestant doctrines and practices detested by Henry VIII were
introduced into the Anglican Church. The Act of Six Articles was repealed in 1547, and
continental reformers, such as the German Martin Bucer, were invited to preach in
England. In 1549, a complete vernacular Book of Common Prayer was issued to provide
uniformity of service in the Anglican Church, and its use was enforced by law. A second
Prayer Book was published in 1552, and a new creed in 42 articles was adopted. Mary I
attempted, however, to restore Roman Catholicism as the state religion, and during her
reign, many Protestants were burned at the stake. Others fled to continental countries,
where their religious opinions often became more radical by contact with Calvinism. A
final settlement was reached under Queen Elizabeth I in 1563. Protestantism was restored,
and Roman Catholics were often persecuted. The 42 articles of the Anglican creed adopted
under Edward VI were reduced to the present Thirty-nine Articles. This creed is Protestant
and closer to Lutheranism than to Calvinism, but the Episcopal organization and ritual of
the Anglican Church is substantially the same as that of the Roman Catholic Church. Large
numbers of people in Elizabeth's time did not consider the Church of England sufficiently
reformed and non-Roman. They were known as dissenters or nonconformists and
eventually formed or became members of numerous Calvinist sects such as the Brownists,
Presbyterians, Puritans, Separatists, and Quakers.

Minor sects

Besides the three great Churches—Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican—formed during the
Reformation, a large number of small sects also arose as a natural consequence of
Protestant repudiation of traditional authority and exaltation of private judgment. One of
the most prominent of the smaller sects, the Anabaptists, found many adherents
throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, where they played an important part in the
Peasants' War. They were persecuted by Catholics as well as by Lutherans, Zwinglians, and
other Protestants, and many of them were put to death. Another prominent denomination,
the Unitarians, included a considerable number of followers in Switzerland, Germany, the
Netherlands, and Poland.
Results of the Reformation

Despite the diversity of revolutionary forces in the 16th century, the Reformation had
largely consistent results throughout Western Europe. In general, the power and wealth
lost by the feudal nobility and the Roman Catholic hierarchy passed to the middle classes
and to monarchical rulers. Various regions of Europe gained political, religious, and
cultural independence. Even in countries such as France and the region now known as
Belgium, where Roman Catholicism continued to prevail, a new individualism and
nationalism in culture and politics developed. The Protestant emphasis on personal
judgment furthered the development of democratic governments based on the collective
choice of individual voters. The destruction of the medieval system of authority removed
traditional religious restrictions on trade and banking, and opened the way for the growth
of modern capitalism. During the Reformation, national languages and literature were
greatly advanced by the wide dissemination of religious literature written in the languages
of the people, rather than in Latin. Popular education was also stimulated through the new
schools founded by Colet in England, Calvin in Geneva, and the Protestant princes in
Germany. Religion became less the province of a highly privileged clergy and more a direct
expression of the beliefs of the people. Religious intolerance, however, raged unabated, and
all the sects continued to persecute one another for at least a century.