How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (45 page)

On June 15, 1520, the Church officially condemned Luther’s writings, and copies were burned in Rome. In response, the students at Wittenberg burned official pronouncements against Luther. Despite Luther’s widespread popularity in Germany, the pope officially excommunicated him in January 1521. Next, Luther was ordered to appear before the Imperial Diet meeting in Worms—his safe conduct provided by Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. Luther’s friends urged him not to go, fearing for his life. But Luther refused to be deterred. It was the most important decision of his life and changed the course of Western history. Luther’s journey to Worms was not that of an unimportant, excommunicated monk. Crowds of supporters thronged along the roads, and “he was attended by a cavalcade of German knights,” in the words of the Luther scholar Ernest Gordon Rupp.
¹¹
During his hearing before the Diet, Luther refused to budge, closing with his immortal “Here I stand.”

A rump session of the Diet organized by members loyal to Rome declared Luther an outlaw, but it was an empty gesture. A large number of German princes formed ranks in defense of Luther and in rebellion against the Church (thus retaining the huge sums that Rome had extracted from their realms). Luther exulted: “I declare, I have made a reformation which will make the pope’s ears ring and heart burst.”
¹²

Causes of the Reformation

Explanations of the Lutheran Reformation must distinguish between the appeal of the phenomenon itself—the stimulus—and factors that may have influenced responses to Lutheranism. The latter can be distinguished into
background
factors, such as Catholic shortcomings;
operative
factors, including characteristics of individuals and groups that governed their choices; and
situational
factors, such as freedom to choose.

Unfortunately, discussions of the causes of the Lutheran Reformation
have been tightly focused on the virtues of the stimulus—on the appeal of the set of doctrines Luther offered. Much of this discussion is irrelevant because it centers on theological intricacies that very few of those who embraced Lutheranism understood or cared about. To be sure, Luther’s basic message—that each individual controls his or her own salvation, since it is gained by faith alone, and that the intercession of the Church is unnecessary—was bound to have appealed widely in this time and place. Even so, Lutheran doctrine is of limited help in explaining the rise of Lutheranism because the doctrine was a constant, while the success or failure of Lutheranism was a variable. That is, everyone in Germany who could possibly have cared was aware of Luther’s message, but only some people in some places turned Lutheran. Why them?

Many background factors have this same shortcoming—they are effectively constants, not variables. Defects of the Catholic Church were the same everywhere; what varied were responses to them. The same is true of the catalogue of “real causes” that a host of social scientists have assembled: the demise of feudalism (supposing it had ever existed), the growth of a money economy, the rise of credit, the expansion of trade, industrialization, urbanization, the expansion of the bourgeoisie, increased taxes, and population growth, among others.
¹³
Even if we accept that all these changes were taking place, they explain nothing about the success of the Lutheran Reformation because they were as prevalent in areas that remained Catholic as they were in those that embraced Lutheranism.

The same shortcoming also applies to two silly explanations historians have offered for the Lutheran Reformation. Some scholars have cited the Black Death as a cause, presumably because it resulted in a widespread loss of confidence in the Church.
¹⁴
But as noted in chapter 7, what evidence there is strongly contests the claim that people turned away from religion in response to the Black Death. In any case, there was a lag of nearly two centuries between the outbreak of plague and Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church. Some historians have suggested another silly cause: celibacy. That is, they argue that Luther, along with many priests and nuns, seized the opportunity to escape their vows.
¹⁵
As is so often the case with efforts to trace complex social affairs to simple matters of sexuality, these claims trivialize human events. In addition, the Black Death was of memory everywhere, and sexual urges are universal, whereas acceptance of Lutheranism was variable.

Let us turn, then, to operative and situational variables that might account for why some areas in Germany, but not others, became Lutheran.

Pamphlets and Printers

Luther’s Reformation 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 and in other parts of Europe pumped out copies. 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 they sold more than three hundred thousand copies altogether.
¹⁶
In 1522 Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German appeared, and it became his bestselling work.
¹⁷

Keep in mind that copyrights didn’t exist in this era and 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. But it was the existence of aggressive local printers that spread Lutheran materials so widely and quickly. In most of the rest of Europe printers operated only in the largest cities, but in Germany printers existed even in many of the smaller towns. Hence, 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.
¹⁸

Connections between printers, printing, and the Reformation have been well tested in a remarkable new study by Hyojoung Kim and Steven Pfaff.
¹⁹
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. They used as their measure whether and when each town officially outlawed saying the Catholic Mass, which is well documented.

Among the many factors Kim and Pfaff studied about each town were whether it had a local printer and whether this printer had produced
an edition of Luther’s Bible. Consistent with an immense historical literature, the sociologists 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 was negative—towns where Luther’s Bible was printed were significantly
less
likely to have turned Lutheran. This suggests—contrary to what many scholars have suggested
²⁰
—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—Luther denounced printers as “sordid mercenaries.”
²¹

The emphasis historians have placed on pamphleteering and printing is understandable, since nothing of the sort had been seen before. But it seems excessive to claim, as Lawrence Stone did, that without “the printing press … it is probable that there would have been no Reformation at all.”
²²
Indeed, assessments of the impact of printed materials on the success of the Lutheran Reformation too often overlook a critical factor: no more than 5 percent of Germans in this era could read.
²³
This helps explain why the Reformation was a middle- and upper-class phenomenon that left the masses virtually untouched. Most people in Germany were counted as Protestants or Catholics because their community had accepted or rejected the Reformation, although they remained impervious to the whole matter, being, at best, semi-Christians.

Professors and Students

The Reformation began at the University of Wittenberg. As the distinguished scholar Paul Grendler put it, “The activities of the first four or five years of the Lutheran Reformation resembled a young faculty uprising.”
²⁴
As word of Luther’s activities spread, enrollment at Wittenberg nearly doubled by 1520, and soon it was the largest university in Germany. Many students attended Luther’s theological lectures, and nearly all of them heard Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Luther’s confidant and ally.
²⁵
After completing their studies at Wittenberg, most students went home and devoted themselves to spreading the Reformation. 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 became professors of theology and began to train more activists. A study of prominent Reformation leaders found that nearly all of them were, or had been, university professors.
²⁶

It turns out, however, that this is a 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, for example, came to be called the “German Rome,” and the University of Louvain was equally anti-Lutheran. Students from these universities went home and served as staunch defenders of the Church.

Apparently universities, at least in Germany, keep their records forever. Records remain for each student who enrolled in the sixteenth century, with the student’s hometown detailed. Even the enrollment lists for specific classes, including those Luther taught, can be reconstructed. For their set of 461 towns and cities, Kim and Pfaff identified the number of residents who were enrolled in Wittenberg and in Basel from 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

The 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 glassblowers, and many local priests. This does not mean, of course, that all or nearly all members of
these groups favored Luther. It merely means that most of Luther’s support came from these groups.

It is well known that these urban groups formed the base of Lutheran recruitment.
²⁷
But why? Did it have something to do with city governance?

These urban supporters were effective because many German towns and cities had sufficient autonomy to make Lutheranism the only lawful faith without suffering outside interference—at least not until the Wars of Religion began. The importance of local political autonomy can be seen through an examination of so-called Free Imperial Cities.
²⁸
These cities owed no allegiance to local princes; paying their taxes directly to the Holy Roman Emperor (which is why they were called Imperial Cities), they remained in complete control of their own tax systems as well as their internal affairs.

There were about sixty-five Free Imperial Cities, but some can be ignored because they were tiny, having no more than a thousand residents.
²⁹
A few had less political freedom than the others because they were situated in a powerful duchy or principality, which made the city fathers act cautiously 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 little threat of external interference. Fortunately for purposes of research, this Borderland area had a number of similarly sized cities 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 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 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.
³⁰
Using a slightly different set of cities, Kim and Pfaff found very similar results.