8.7 — The Reformation and the Wars of Religion

The immediate trigger was a fundraising campaign for a building.

Pope Leo X needed money to rebuild St Peter's basilica in Rome. One of the instruments used was the sale of indulgences — remissions of the temporal penalty for sin, drawing on the Church's treasury of merit. A Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel was selling them in Germany with a jingle that Luther quoted with disgust: as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.

Half the proceeds went to Rome. The other half went to the Archbishop of Mainz, to repay a loan from the Fugger banking house that he had taken out to buy his archbishopric.

On 31 October 1517 an Augustinian friar and university lecturer named Martin Luther sent his Ninety-Five Theses to that Archbishop, and — by the traditional account, which is not certainly true — nailed a copy to the church door in Wittenberg, which was the ordinary way of announcing an academic disputation.

He expected an argument among theologians. He got Europe.

What Luther actually argued

The theology matters, because the politics is unintelligible without it.

Justification by faith alone. Luther's central conclusion, reached from reading Paul's letters, was that a person is made right with God by faith, as a free gift, not by any accumulation of good works, penance, pilgrimage or payment. If that is true, the entire apparatus of merit — indulgences, masses for the dead, the treasury of the saints — has no basis.

Scripture alone. The Bible, not the Church's tradition or the Pope's authority, is the source of doctrine. And therefore it should be available in languages people read, which is why translation became the movement's characteristic act.

The priesthood of all believers. No spiritual caste standing between a person and God. A priest performs a function; he is not a different kind of Christian.

The consequences follow immediately. If scripture alone is authoritative and every believer can read it, then the Pope's authority, the monasteries, clerical celibacy, most of the sacraments, and the Church's enormous property all lose their justification at once.

Luther was excommunicated in 1521 and summoned to the Diet of Worms, where he refused to recant. The words attributed to him — Here I stand, I can do no other — are probably a later addition; his recorded statement was that unless he was convinced by scripture and plain reason, he could not and would not recant, because to act against conscience is neither safe nor right.

He was declared an outlaw and was hidden by the Elector of Saxony in the Wartburg castle, where in eleven weeks he translated the New Testament into German.

Why it succeeded when previous attempts failed

Chapter 8.2 gave the technological answer: printing. Hus was burned in 1415 and his movement contained; Wycliffe's followers were suppressed. Luther's pamphlets were in every German town within weeks and could not be recalled.

But three other factors did as much work.

German princes had reasons of their own. Church lands were roughly a third of the territory in some German states, exempt from princely taxation and answerable to Rome. A prince who adopted the Reformation acquired the monasteries. He also acquired control over the church in his own territory and freedom from papal interference. This is not cynicism — many were sincere — and the material incentive was enormous and it explains the geography of adoption very well.

German resentment of Rome was long-standing. Money flowed south, appointments were made in Rome, and Italian clergy held German benefices.

And the Church's response was slow and clumsy — excommunication and threats when the argument was already public and being conducted in print in the vernacular.

What Luther did next, and it is not comfortable

Two episodes belong in any honest account.

The Peasants' War of 1524–25. German peasants, hearing the language of Christian freedom and the priesthood of all believers, rose against serfdom and manorial dues and cited Luther in their manifestos. Luther wrote Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, urging the princes to smite, slay and stab. Around 100,000 peasants were killed in the suppression. He had concluded that spiritual freedom implied nothing about social order and that rebellion was intolerable, and he expressed it in the most violent terms available.

And his writings on Jews. He had initially hoped Jews would convert to a reformed Christianity; when they did not, he wrote On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543, calling for synagogues to be burned, Jewish homes destroyed, their books confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. The text was reprinted and used by the Nazi regime. Lutheran churches in Germany and elsewhere have formally repudiated it. It belongs in the record.

Calvin, and what his theology did

John Calvin, a French lawyer, established a reformed church in Geneva from 1541 and produced the most systematic Protestant theology.

Predestination is the doctrine he is known for: God has determined from eternity who is saved and who is not, and nothing a person does alters it. This sounds paralysing and its practical effect ran the other way.

Max Weber's argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is that a believer who cannot know whether they are among the elect looks for signs, and that worldly success achieved through disciplined, methodical, un-enjoyed labour came to be read as such a sign — producing a culture of hard work, thrift, reinvestment rather than consumption, and a religious sanctification of ordinary commercial life.

The thesis is contested and it should be stated with its criticisms. Catholic Italian and south German bankers had financed Europe for centuries before Calvin (Chapter 9.2). Correlations between Protestantism and growth are confounded by literacy — Protestant regions taught reading because everyone had to read the Bible, and literacy predicts economic growth by itself (Chapter 9.4). The current balance of evidence gives more weight to the literacy channel than to the theological one, and Weber's observation that religious ideas can have unintended economic consequences remains valuable.

Geneva under Calvin was also a disciplinary regime with a consistory regulating behaviour, and Michael Servetus, a physician and theologian who denied the Trinity — and who incidentally described the pulmonary circulation independently — was burned in Geneva in 1553 with Calvin's approval. Reformation did not mean toleration.

England, for entirely different reasons

Henry VIII's break with Rome in the 1530s was not doctrinal. He had written a book against Luther and been given the title Defender of the Faith by the Pope for it — a title British monarchs still hold.

He needed an annulment, the Pope refused — partly because the Pope was under the effective control of the Emperor, who was the nephew of the queen Henry wished to set aside — and Henry made himself Supreme Head of the Church in England.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries, 1536–41, transferred monastic lands to the crown and then largely to the gentry who bought them. This created a landed class with a direct financial interest in never restoring Catholicism, which is a large part of why the English Reformation stuck.

The doctrine then swung violently — Protestant under Edward VI, Catholic under Mary I with around 280 Protestants burned, and settled under Elizabeth I into a compromise deliberately designed to be doctrinally broad enough that most people could conform.

The wars

Europe then fought over this for 130 years.

The German wars ended at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 with the principle cuius regio, eius religio — whose realm, his religion. The ruler chooses the religion of the territory and dissenters may emigrate. It is not toleration; it is a partition of the map by confession, and it left Calvinism unrecognised, which is a fuse.

The French Wars of Religion, 1562–98, between Catholics and Huguenots, killed perhaps two to four million. The St Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 killed thousands of Huguenots in Paris and across France in a few days. It ended when Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot, converted to Catholicism to take the throne — the remark attributed to him, that Paris is worth a mass, captures the exhaustion — and issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598 granting Huguenots defined rights. Louis XIV revoked it in 1685 and around 200,000 Huguenots left, taking their skills to Britain, the Netherlands and Prussia.

The Dutch Revolt, 1568–1648, was a rebellion of the Netherlands against Spanish rule with religion at its centre, and it produced the Dutch Republic — which became, for a century, the richest society in Europe and the most tolerant (Chapter 9.3).

The Thirty Years War

1618–1648, and it is the worst thing that happened in Europe between the Black Death and the twentieth century.

It began as a religious conflict in Bohemia — the Defenestration of Prague, in which imperial officials were thrown out of a castle window and survived by landing in a dung heap — and became a general European war about the balance of power.

The clearest evidence that it stopped being religious: Catholic France, under Cardinal Richelieu, funded and then joined the Protestant side against Catholic Habsburg Spain and Austria, because the Habsburgs surrounding France was a strategic threat and the theology was secondary.

The destruction. Armies of the period largely lived off the land, which means systematic plunder of the countryside, repeatedly, for three decades. Combined with famine and the epidemics that follow armies, estimates of German population loss run to around 20 percent overall and to a third or more in the worst-affected regions. Some towns lost most of their inhabitants. It took a century to recover.

Westphalia

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended it, and it is conventionally treated as the beginning of the modern international order.

What it established. Sovereignty: a ruler has supreme authority within his territory and no external power — including the Pope or the Emperor — may intervene in it. Non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. Legal equality of states regardless of size or religion, negotiating as equals. And religious settlement: Calvinism recognised, and rulers could no longer simply expel subjects of the wrong faith.

Two honest qualifications. Historians have shown that "Westphalian sovereignty" as a doctrine was substantially read back into the treaties by later theorists, and the treaties themselves are more limited and more specific. And the principle has been violated continuously ever since. What is not in doubt is that the treaties marked the end of religion as a legitimate basis for war between European states, and that the framework of negotiation between formally equal sovereign states dates from here. Chapter 13.7 shows the United Nations still built on it.

Where this shows up in your life

The map of European and American religion — northern Europe Protestant, southern Catholic, with the boundary running approximately where the armies stopped in 1555 and 1648.

Literacy. Protestant regions promoted reading because salvation depended on personal access to scripture, and school attendance rates in Lutheran Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia were among the highest in the world by the eighteenth century. This is the channel through which the Reformation most plausibly affected economic development (Chapter 9.4).

Migration. Huguenots, Puritans, Pilgrims, Mennonites and Quakers all moved to escape persecution, and several of them founded colonies — which is why religious dissenters are so heavily represented in the founding population of the United States and why its constitution took the position it did on establishment.

And the political lesson is one Chapter 13.5 develops. Toleration in Europe was not adopted because anyone concluded it was right. It was adopted after 130 years of war demonstrated that the alternative was mutual destruction and that neither side could win. Rights are frequently the residue of exhaustion, and that is a less inspiring and more useful account of where they come from.

What the next page covers

In the middle of all this, a small number of people worked out a procedure for determining whether a claim about the natural world is true, and the procedure turned out to work. Chapter 8.8 covers the scientific revolution — what actually changed in method, why Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton matter individually, what the Galileo affair really involved, why the scientific society and the journal were as important as any discovery, and the honest answer to why this happened in Europe rather than in China or the Islamic world, both of which had been ahead.