How a monk's protest in Wittenberg in 1517, spread by the printing press, split Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant Europe, and led to more than a century of religious wars.
Stop 01 · 31 October 1517
Wittenberg: 1517
In 1515 Pope Leo X offered a plenary indulgence, a payment said to reduce punishment for sins, to fund the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. When the preacher Johann Tetzel sold it near Wittenberg in 1517, Martin Luther, a monk teaching at the town's small university in Saxony, feared that buyers thought they need not repent. On 31 October he sent his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences to Archbishop Albert of Mainz. Printers copied them, and within weeks they were being read across Germany: as a pamphlet in Basel, as posters in Leipzig and Nuremberg. Luther went on to argue that salvation came through faith alone, and that the Bible, not the Pope, was the final authority.
Detail of the danse macabre (1490) by John of Kastav in the Holy Trinity Church, Hrastovlje, SloveniaJohn of Kastav · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
Printed copies spread through Germany · Spread of ideas
In 1515 Pope Leo X offered a plenary indulgence, a payment said to reduce punishment for sins, to fund the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. When the preacher Johann Tetzel sold it near Wittenberg in 1517, Martin Luther, a monk teaching at the town's small university in Saxony, feared that buyers thought they need not repent. On 31 October he sent his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences to Archbishop Albert of Mainz. Printers copied them, and within weeks they were being read across Germany: as a pamphlet in Basel, as posters in Leipzig and Nuremberg. Luther went on to argue that salvation came through faith alone, and that the Bible, not the Pope, was the final authority.
In June 1520 Pope Leo X condemned 41 of Luther's propositions in the bull Exsurge Domine, and in January 1521 he excommunicated him. That spring, at the Diet of Worms, the young Emperor Charles V demanded he take back his writings. On 17 and 18 April Luther refused, saying his conscience was captive to the Word of God; tradition adds the words 'Here I stand'. The Edict of Worms declared him a notorious heretic and an outlaw. His prince, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, had him hidden in Wartburg Castle, where, living as 'Knight George' from May 1521 to March 1522, he translated the New Testament into German. Many German princes and cities adopted the new faith.
Luther's challenge to authority inspired others to go further. In 1524 peasants in south-western Germany rose against their lords and abbots, and the revolt spread through Alsace, central Germany and the Austrian lands. In March 1525, at Memmingen, peasant delegates drew up the Twelve Articles, demanding the right to choose their own pastors and an end to being treated as serfs. Radical preachers such as Thomas Müntzer backed the rising, but Luther urged the princes to crush it in Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants. At Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525 the princes' army routed Müntzer's followers; Müntzer was executed at Mühlhausen. Up to 100,000 of some 300,000 rebels were killed in Europe's largest popular uprising before 1789.
The Reformation was never one movement. In 1519 Huldrych Zwingli became people's priest at the Grossmünster in Zurich and led a more radical reform. He met Luther at Marburg in 1529, but they could not agree on the meaning of communion, and in 1531 Zwingli died on the battlefield when the Catholic cantons attacked Zurich. In Geneva, the Frenchman John Calvin, author of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), built a reformed church and city from 1541; its council burned the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus for heresy. Calvin's ideas spread to France (the Huguenots), the Netherlands, Scotland, and Hungary and Transylvania, where Debrecen became known as the 'Calvinist Rome'.
Rulers joined in, for faith and for power. In Sweden, Gustav Vasa, who had taken power in a war of liberation from Denmark, began breaking with Rome in 1527, although the question was not finally settled until the Uppsala Synod of 1593. In Denmark–Norway, Christian III made Lutheranism the official faith when he became king in 1536–37, and the Catholic bishops were removed and arrested. In England, Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon from 1527, and when Pope Clement VII refused he broke with Rome. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 made him Supreme Head of the Church of England, and between 1536 and 1541 the monasteries were closed and their lands sold.
In Germany, the Lutheran princes had formed the Schmalkaldic League. Charles V defeated it in 1546–47, winning at Mühlberg and forcing Wittenberg to capitulate, but he could not restore religious unity. His brother Ferdinand negotiated a settlement, the Peace of Augsburg, signed on 25 September 1555. Each prince of the Holy Roman Empire could now choose Lutheranism or Catholicism for his lands, a rule later summed up as cuius regio, eius religio: 'whose realm, his religion'. Subjects who disagreed were allowed time to emigrate, although serfs were largely excluded from that right, and Calvinists were left out altogether. The settlement held for decades, but its collapse early in the next century helped bring on the Thirty Years' War.
The Catholic Church reformed itself. The Council of Trent, called by Pope Paul III, met in twenty-five sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563. It fixed Catholic doctrine against the Protestants, endorsed the Latin Vulgate as the Church's Bible and tightened discipline; its work led to a new catechism, breviary and missal, and so to the Tridentine Mass. New orders, above all the Jesuits, founded in 1540, ran schools: by 1556 they had 74 colleges on three continents. The Counter-Reformation drastically reduced Protestantism in Poland–Lithuania, France, Italy and the Habsburg lands, including Austria, southern Germany and Bohemia. Europe settled into a map that has lasted: a mainly Protestant north and a Catholic south.
Religion and politics became inseparable, and war followed. France's Wars of Religion (1562–1598) cost between two and four million lives through violence, famine and disease. They included the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of Huguenots, which began in Paris on the night of 23–24 August 1572, days after a royal wedding, and spread to other cities; estimates of the dead range from 5,000 to 30,000. In 1598 Henry IV, a former Protestant, granted the Huguenots rights in the Edict of Nantes. The Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain began around 1568. The worst was the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which began in Prague and devastated Germany, killing 4.5 to 8 million people; some regions lost more than half their population.
The Peace of Westphalia, signed at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, ended the Thirty Years' War. The talks drew 109 delegations and were split between two towns, Catholic Münster and Protestant-held Osnabrück. Calvinism at last won legal recognition beside Catholicism and Lutheranism, and rulers lost the power to dictate their subjects' private worship. The independence of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation was formally recognised, although both had long been free in practice. Many historians see the peace as the beginning of a Europe of sovereign states, not one Christendom; others argue that this reading was projected back onto it in the 19th and 20th centuries.