Daily Life During The Reformation (11 page)

Even though the views of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin had
similar theological points of view, it did not take long before their followers
turned to conflict. Luther forced a rift with the Catholic Church by deviating
from established dogma. Zwingli rejected the literal view of the Eucharist,
which eventually ruptured relations with Luther. Calvinism, going further,
broke with Zwingli and Luther. Luther also fell out with Erasmus.

While Geneva at that time may seem bizarre to many people
today, it should be remembered that the God-fearing people of the sixteenth
century rejoiced in the restrictions placed upon their so-called saintly city.
They believed humility, unpretentiousness, and piety were the will of God. All
assumed they would be one of the elect.

TROUBLE IN STRASSBURG

Elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, the free city of
Strassburg was undergoing religious problems. The Imperial City, a crossroad of
European commercial routes was comparatively wealthy. Many people, poor and
rich, passed through its gates. The city had a thriving book trade, and
evangelical works, such as those of Martin Luther, were in demand.

Strassburg contained over twenty thousand inhabitants in
the early sixteenth century not including thousands of peasants who lived
beyond the walls but under the jurisdiction of city institutions. Industry was
practically unknown except for cheap woolen goods. The people were by and large
anticlerical, stimulated by humanist scholars and dislike of the bishop who
owned much of the surrounding land and controlled the monasteries and clergy.
Violent protests against city officials, composed of the upper crust families,
and against the Church were not uncommon. From 1519, anti-Church pamphlets were
common in Alsace.

Lives of Peasants and Village Clergy

Conflicts periodically arose between poor peasants and
village priests, sometimes just as poor. Clergymen often made loans to peasant
farmers, but if the farm failed, the peasant defaulted leaving the priest even
poorer than he was before. Many clergy depended on the income from these loans.

A number of parishes had long before been incorporated into
ecclesiastical institutions such as chapters or monasteries, and peasant income
also supported wealthy cannons and Church administrators. Around Strassburg as
in other places, clerics often held more than one benefice, and the peasant
complained that there were too few priests, and the quality of their service
was abysmal.

The city elite and the bishop of the Cathedral controlled
the outlying lands and collected the tithes and rents. Bad harvest and
inflation had left many destitute, but stirred by Luther’s numerous tracts on
the gospel and on individual freedom that inundated Alsace, they demanded
justice. The city council met some of the claims of the gardeners (the largest
guild in the city) by putting a few restrictions on the Catholic clergy and
passing reform bills. It was not enough, and the peasants’ demands grew.

The gardeners were the most downtrodden, low paid and
unhappy. In 1523, a large group of them withheld payment of tithes, rents, and
dues to their landlords. The next year, 400, mostly gardeners, attacked
convents and monasteries they felt were corrupt, smashing statues.

Gardeners and artisans including tailors, furriers, barrel
makers, potters, shoemakers, tanners, butchers, vintners, and other commoners
joined together, discussed their problems, and often petitioned city councils
for improvement in their working conditions and lives. Sometimes their leaders
were imprisoned or banned from the city for several years. The city council was
slow to act on their demands.

Peasants protested against the Strassburg Cathedral chapter
on whose land they worked and attacked a convent in 1525. Another 2,000 rebels,
consisting of many Strassburg gardeners, plundered the abbey of Aldorf. Pillage
continued for three days until the duke of Lorraine and his army ended the
upheaval with much peasant and artisan bloodshed.

Reform leaders preached in the countryside and peasants
listened and sometimes revolted when they heard that Jesus favored the poor and
not the rich.

For many, the pace of reform was too slow. The city council
composed of nobility and guild representatives, an oligarchy like that of
Zurich and most other cities of Europe, made cautious concessions ascertaining their
own positions of power were not endangered. By 1524, radical reformists were
demanding more rapid socio-economic and religious change.

Matthew Zell, the first major reformer influential on the
city council, welcomed and supported Martin Bucer, a native of Alsace, on his
arrival in the city. That the common people were eager to hear the voices
expounding the New Gospel was evident from the great crowds that came to hear
Zell, expelled from the church, preaching from a wooden pulpit made by the
carpenters’ guild. His congregations numbered more than 3,000 members.

Bucer, like so many other reformers, had first trained for
the priesthood. By the end of 1523, the city council published a mandate
allowing evangelical preaching in the city. Bucer became a star. He would
become leader of the Reformed Churches in Switzerland and South Germany after
the death of Zwingli repudiating the idea that the rite of Mass was a true
sacrifice.

Meanwhile the city council vacillated over the religious
issues confronting the populace, while the number of citizens supporting the
Reformation continued to rise, and hostility for the Catholic clergy grew.
Conrad Treger, the prior of the Augustinians, attacked the reformed preachers
and labeled all the burghers of Strassburg heretics. Angry mobs broke into
monasteries destroying religious icons. Many opponents of the Reformation,
including Treger, were arrested. The council belatedly took action requesting
an official statement from the evangelical ministers. Bucer summarized the
teachings of the Reformation in 12 articles that included justification by
faith alone, rejection of the Mass, monastic vows, saint veneration, purgatory,
the traditional liturgy, and the authority of the pope. He emphasized obedience
to the government. Treger, released from prison, left Strassburg ending open
opposition to the Reformation. Bucer spent much of his time attempting to
repair the differences between Luther and Zwingli in their divisive views of
the Eucharist.

THE NETHERLANDS

The Protestant reform engulfed the Spanish-held Netherlands
of the Holy Roman Empire. The Netherlands consisted of French speakers in the
south (Flanders and Brabant), Dutch speakers in the center (Holland), and
Frisian in the north (Friesland).Towns such as Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam,
Dordrecht, and Antwerp were wealthy centers under the leadership of merchant
families. Dutch burghers were educated, energetic, and independent minded
people.

Reformation in the Netherlands was initiated by popular
movements and reinforced by the arrival of Protestant refugees from Germany and
France and later from England under Mary Tudor. Charles V, the Holy Roman
Emperor, issued strict orders against the printing and preaching of the works
of Luther, but records of the period name numerous people suspected of
heretical opinions.

The earliest presence of the Reformation was in the form of
Lutheranism, and two monks who had read Luther’s works were burned at the stake
in Brussels in 1523. Followers of Luther, however, active in the 1520s did not
develop into a popular movement and remained small and intellectual. The first
expression of the new religion came from Anabaptists in the 1530s who followed
the leadership of Menno Simons from Friesland, ordained in the Catholic
priesthood. Influenced by Luther’s works, he left the Church to become an
evangelical preacher and allied himself with the Dutch Anabaptists. Teaching
that neither baptism nor Communion conferred grace upon an individual and that
Grace was bestowed only through faith in Jesus Christ, he attracted large
audiences. Although not the founder of the sect, his influence was such that
many Dutch Anabaptists adopted his name, and became known as Mennonites.

Meanwhile, Dutch publishers, risking their lives in major
cities, clandestinely took on the dangerous but lucrative work of publishing
heretical works for a growing market.

In the 1540s, Calvinism took root in the French-speaking
south, imported by missionaries from Geneva, and grew rapidly. Charles V
proclaimed two brutal edicts in 1550 whereby mere suspicion of heresy was
enough to burn the suspect at the stake.

When his son, Felipe II, a Spaniard and Catholic through
and through, took over his share of the Habsburg Empire, which included Spain
and the Netherlands in 1556, he was even less tolerant and installed the
Inquisition while curbing the traditional rights of the nobility and townsmen.

Felipe’s methods to bring the Netherlands to heel increased
the unpopularity of Spain and the Catholic Church, equated as the same
oppressors. In 1566, a radical mob of Protestants looted and destroyed hundreds
of churches, and anti-Catholic riots spread across the country.

Felipe II unleashed Spanish troops on the Netherlands under
the command of the bloodthirsty duke of Alba whose barbaric actions resulted in
open revolt. Between 1567 and 1573, thousands of Protestant leaders were
executed. The war of independence waged by the Dutch against Spain began in
1568.

William I, prince of Orange, led the revolt and eventually
took control of most northern towns. In 1579 the Union of Utrecht, an alliance
of all northern and some southern provinces, was formed. Those that joined the
union would become the Netherlands; those that did not would become Belgium. In
1581, the Union of Utrecht proclaimed independence from Spain. The new nation
suffered a series of reverses in the ensuing war. Alba’s firm grip impelled the
southern regions back to Catholicism causing a flood of refugees to the north
where Protestantism flourished and where the sea beggars with attacks on
Spanish shipping and troops in the north helped secure quasi independence.

Meanwhile, the Dutch were turning to Calvinism as refugees
from Flanders and the Brabant poured in. The seven Northern provinces that
eluded the Spanish grasp came to be recognized by England as independent
Protestant states.

With a spirit of toleration in the Dutch Netherlands, the
region came to be recognized as a safe haven for persecuted people of all kinds
of religious shades and attitudes.

In 1573, William I proclaimed himself a Calvinist. In 1584,
Balthasar Gerard, a supporter of Felipe, felt that William of Orange had
betrayed the Spanish king and the Catholic religion. Felipe had declared
William an outlaw and pledged a reward of 25,000 crowns for his assassination.
Gerard decided to collect it. William was shot down on the stairway of his own
house after a meeting with Gerard, but his son Maurice continued the warfare
until his death in 1625. Finally in 1648, the Eighty Years’ War of attrition
ended, and the Netherlands received unconditional independence at the Treaty of
Westphalia. Belgium remained under foreign rule until 1831.

NORTHERN EUROPE

While the Protestant Reformation was felt across all of
Europe, the movement was strongest in the north. After some years of turmoil in
the sixteenth century, all of Scandinavia ultimately became Protestant, as the
kings of Denmark (who also ruled Norway and Iceland) and Sweden (who also ruled
Finland) adopted the principles of the Reformation.

To a large degree, the reform movement introduced in
Denmark was through the work of Hans Tausen, a disenchanted monk and a student
of Luther. There is little doubt that the Danes were ready for a change.
Imprisoned by his order, people came to his cell in droves to listen to him
preach, and when he won over the prior of the monastery to his views and was
released, there were few churches of significant size to hold the crowds. He
addressed the people in the market place from a church tower.

When the Franciscans refused to allow him to preach in
their more ample church, a mob broke in by force. A compromise was arranged
whereby friars were to preach in the morning and Tausen in the afternoon. The
bishop, unhappy with these proceedings, sent armed men to the church to arrest
Tausen. The parishioners, who had carried their weapons with them, drove off
the bishop’s men.

In October 1526, King Frederick I took Hans Tausen under
his protection, appointed him his chaplain, and charged him to continue to
preach the gospel to the citizens of Viborg who were made responsible for his
safety.

On the death of his benefactor, Frederick I, Bishop Ronnow
of Copenhagen wanted him banished. The people took up arms against the bishop
and would have killed him but for Tausen’s intervention. The bishop rescinded
his accusation, allowing Tausen to preach. Christian III, son of the dead king,
an open reformist, won an ensuing civil war and the crown in 1537.

In Sweden and Finland, the Reformation was spearheaded by
the Swedish King, Gustav Vasa, in 1523. When the pope remonstrated over
Gustav’s interference in Swedish church affairs, the official connection
between Sweden and the papacy was severed. The crown confiscated Church
property, and from then on the clergy were subject to civil law, and all
ecclesiastical appointments required royal approval. Official sanction was
given to Lutheranism that was to be taught in the schools and preached in the
churches.

SOUTHERN EUROPE

Spain, Portugal, and Italy remained predominantly Catholic.
In a country such as Spain, a united state under a strong Catholic monarch, and
a powerful Inquisition supported by the people, such religious transformation
could not have arisen. As soon as a spark glimmered, it was quickly extinguished.

Subjected to the will of the Inquisition, the few
Protestants in Spain were forced to live precariously, for even having visited
a Protestant country was enough to put one under suspicion of apostasy. Even
foreigners had to go before the inquisitors for the slightest infringement of
the rules such as failing to remove one’s hat when the bishop’s carriage passed
by. There had been a few defections in Spain, but the Inquisition maintained
tight control over all religious activity, and heretics were summarily burned
at the stake. With inquisitorial police everywhere and neighbors ready to
denounce one another for any suspicious behavior, Protestantism remained
confined to a few very secret worshippers.