Useful Notes / The Protestant Reformation

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The story goes that on All Hallows' Eve of 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed a piece of parchment on the doors at the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg. That parchment was named the "95 Theses", condemning the practice of the indulgences, a way of paying the church to absolve one's sins. That stunt, at best, would have looked insignificant and a bit of an annoyance at the onlookers' perspective, as nailing parchment on doors was common at the time^note In fact, nailing one's objections to the church door was the standard way of calling for a theological debate; John Eck answered Luther's challenge, and during their debate pointed out he was espousing similar arguments to Jan Hus. Luther was shocked, as he'd accepted Hus as a heretic, and on reading his works was stunned how much sense they made to him, further shaping what would become Lutheran thought., but this particular parchment kickstarted the events to come.

By Luther's time, the Catholic Church had fallen into decay, considered by many to be a Corrupt Church. In addition to the offering of indulgences, illegitimate children and misuse of church property by priests were widespread, as exemplified by Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503), who openly used his illegitimate children for political gain and had a number of enemies murdered.

There had been a handful of attempts to reform the church prior to Luther, such as St. Catherine of Siena, John Wycliffe, and Jan Hus. Their efforts and success varied; Jan Hus was even burnt at the stake for his calls to reform ^note Although, inversely, his Czech followers were probably the most successful of the early reformers, with many military victories against the crusades called against them, ultimately carving out a space for themselves in which the Catholic church resignedly ignored them and their weird Czech ways. Compared to them, Luther had one advantage: the printing press. And with this incredible machine that had produced copies of the Gutenberg Bible, his prints of reform and his vernacular translation of the Bible were easily spread throughout Europe.

Charles V was initially curious about what Luther had to say, but the strongly Catholic emperor-king was not fond of what he heard from him in the Diet of Worms (1521), and opted to ban Luther's teachings in the Holy Roman Empire — although perhaps naturally, they continued to spread throughout Europe regardless. In 1530, Luther and his companions Philip Melanchthon and Justus Jonas published the Augsburg Confession, in which they defined in 28 articles what a Protestant believed in and what they wanted to change in the church. This confession was adopted by breakaway state churches of the principalities of Saxony and Lubeck, and soon were widely adopted in most of modern-day Germany, Prussia, Scandinavia and modern-day Latvia,^note the first Protestant city outside of modern-day Germany was actually Riga, a predominantly German city at the beginning of the 16th century leading to what we call today the "Lutheran Church". Watching it escalate, Charles V would attempt to reconcile things, even trying to get Luther and the Pope in contact so they could sort it out without breaking Christendom apart, but it didn't work out, in no small part due to Rome's neglectful response, and diplomacy gave pass to conflict.

However, Luther wasn't the only one. He inspired a number of other theologians to preach against the Catholic Church. Starting with Huldrych Zwingli in Switzerland, through the Anabaptists (a broad movement which include the modern-day Hutterites, Mennonites and the Amish), John Calvin in Switzerland, John Knox in Scotland and later Jacobus Arminius in the Netherlands, which would later challenge some aspects of Calvinist doctrine. Calvin, Zwingli and Knox are part of what is called the "Reformed" tradition.^note Also called "Calvinist", which is Non-Indicative Name as some of the Reformed had some disagreements with Calvin's theology. They differed from Lutherans not only in theology, but also in the purpose of the Reformation: Luther wanted to reform the Catholic Church from inside-out, while the Reformed wanted to "return" to the primitive church, breaking away and organizing themselves into independent churches — which would eventually be a bit of a moot point since the Catholic church did their own "reformation" (see below) and the Lutheran churches are still separated to this day.

Of course, the different reformers couldn't all agree with each other. Luther and Zwingli butted heads regarding the Communion, as Luther believed in the "Real Presence of Christ" in the Eucharist while Zwingli believed that it was mostly symbolic. Meanwhile a few other groups belived Zwingli, Calvin and Luther weren't radical enough, the Anabaptists for one instituted adult-only baptism, even "rebaptism" (baptizing again even if you were baptized as an infant), and preached that the faithful should live separate from society to be truly pious, with some believing in total pacifism. Meanwhile, preachers and theologians inspired by the Reformation such as Thomas Müntzer would preach rebellion against not only the Catholic Church but also against the secular feudal lords of Germany, with a more wordly, social doctrine, which would lead to the bloody German Peasants' War in 1524-25. The Anabaptists, Müntzer and many other minor fringe groups with a myriad of atypical and unorthodox believes (such as the non-trinitarian Unitarians and the Spiritualists^note non-institutional reformers who believed authentic Christianity came from direct inner inspiration of the Holy Spirit rather than churches, sacraments, or fixed doctrine) have been referred by later historiographical term "Radical Reformation", as opposed to Luther's and Calvin's "Magisterial Reformation". The Augsburg Confession explicitly condemned the Anabaptists, and the Radical Reformation would be persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants alike. The Calvinists and Lutherans never became hostile to that point, but there's a significant difference in both theologies and in worship culture: Lutheran churches will often have stained glass, paintings and crucifixes (as Luther wasn't iconoclastic) while their Calvinist counterparts are consistently plain, austere and devoid of images. The Lutherans have a service similar to the Catholic mass, retaining a structured liturgy, set prayers, and often traditional vestments and music, whereas Calvinist services tend to be simpler and more focused on the sermon and the reading of Scripture, with less emphasis on ritual.

In contrast, Italy, France, and Spain remained staunchly Catholic, though a highly persecuted Protestant minority in France, the Huguenots, sparked considerable conflict before being almost completely suppressed. Although in an emblematic case of Realpolitik, the Catholic France would later join the Protestant side during the Thirty Years' War to oppose the Habsburgs. In Italy, the homeland of the Pope, most rulers remained Catholic yet never hesitated to position politically against him, with several wars seeing devout Catholic states opposing the Papacy itself. The Waldensians, a proto-Protestant group active since the 12th century which survived in Alpine parts the Piedmont region (Northwest of Italy and Southeast of France) despite strong prosecution, aligned themselves with the Protestant Reformation and adopted Reformed traditions and doctrine, seeing a revival until a brutal supression by the Savoy Dukes.

The Kingdom of Hungary had a more complex situation due to the simultaneous invasion of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which by the 16th century had effectively divided Hungary into three areas: Royal Hungary in the north, controlled by the Habsburgs; southern and central Hungary under direct Ottoman control; and Transylvania in the east, an Ottoman vassal and semi-autonomous state. Lutheranism arrived in the late 16th century, with the more popular Reformed (Calvinist) movement soon following and spreading widely throughout the land. Royal Hungary developed a large Lutheran population despite the Habsburgs’ displeasure. The Ottomans, on the other hand, while preferring conversion to Islam, often encouraged Calvinism within their domains, as they identified it as a rival to Catholic Habsburg influence and their relative lack of elaborate church hierarchy and its rejection of religious images (iconoclasm) made it appear, at least superficially, closer to Islamic sensibilities than Catholicism (in fact, many Calvinists which fought against the Habsburgs answered accusation of (in)directly helping the Ottomans by developing a motto: "Rather Turkish than Popish"). Transylvania meanwhile became a center not only for the Reformation, but also for religious pluralism, having Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Reformed, Jews and even Unitarians living under a system of legal tolerance that was unusual for the period. In fact, King John II Sigismund, who encouraged this tolerance, was the only Unitarian head of state until the election of John Adams as President of the United States in 1797.^note The United States would later have three more presidents associated with Unitarianism: John Quincy Adams (1825–1829), Millard Fillmore (1850–1853), and William Howard Taft (1909–1913). However, all four—including John Adams—were Unitarian in a later sense, emerging from the Puritan Congregationalist tradition as it was reshaped by Enlightenment rationalism. While historically connected and loosely descedant from it, this form of Unitarianism differed significantly from the more doctrinal and confessional 16th-century Unitarianism of Transylvania. In any case, the Habsburg's re-conquest of Hungary through the 17th and 18th centuries would see the heavy supression of Protestantism and a gradual reassertion of Catholic dominance, particularly through Counter-Reformation policies supported by the Habsburg state.

Britain confused the matter further when English King Henry VIII declared himself head of the new Church of England, dissolving the monasteries, colonizing Catholic Ireland, and divorcing his first wife Catherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn in hopes for a male heir.^note Which proved futile as she bore a daughter. A great daughter, a daughter with "the heart and stomach of a king", a daughter who in many ways was basically Henry as a woman, but a daughter nonetheless. Scotland would convert to Protestantism through the preachings of John Knox, a student of Calvin who (significantly) had been allowed to preach as a Church of England priest in Newcastle, London, and Buckinghamshire under Edward VI (while Scotland remained officially Catholic under Mary, Queen of Scots and her regent, her French mother Mary of Guise). The Scottish Kirk would influence king James VI and I throughout his whole reign(s), such as the translation of the Bible in English, named in his honor. The reigns of Henry VIII and his children, and James VI and his children would lead to a century and a half of conflict over whether the new Church was Catholic or Protestant. To make it even more complicated, the 17th century saw the birth of the "Puritan" movement inside the Church of England, which wanted to purify (thus "Puritan") the church from its Roman Catholic elements and adopt a strict Calvinist doctrine, flourishing under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Some Puritans went even further and rejected a state-mandated church, advocating full indepedence and new doctrines not held by the Anglican Church, who became known as the "Dissenters", "Nonconformists" or "Separatists". This movement saw the rise in England of new denominations such as the Baptists^note not to be confused with the Anabaptists. Though they share the ideia of Adult-only Baptism and a focus on the authority of Scripture, they differ on questions of theological emphases, practices, and denominational structures., Quakers, Methodists, Unitarians, Congregationalists and the Presbyterians^note Considered "Nonconformist" in England, but in Scotland mainstream and part of the state church (the Kirk). A large number of them would later immigrate in mass to The Thirteen American Colonies, becoming the figure of the New England Puritan and influencing the formation of the future United States of America.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Orthodox Church largely sat this one out. Having already split from Rome in the East–West Schism, they didn’t see much reason to pick a side in what looked like a Western family feud. Most Orthodox Christians were living under the Ottoman Empire, which tended to care more about keeping the peace (and taxes flowing) than about fine points of Christian theology, while the Tsardom of Russia was busy developing its own “Third Rome” identity. There were a few attempts at crossover episodes: Protestant theologians reached out to the East hoping to find common ground, and figures like Cyril Lucaris flirted with Calvinist ideas, but these experiments were ultimately rejected. The Orthodox response, formalized at the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, basically amounted to “thanks, but no thanks”, disagreeing with Protestant doctrines like sola scriptura while continuing to disagree with Catholic claims about papal authority. Instead of a Reformation, the Orthodox world got its own internal drama, particularly in Russia, where reforms under Patriarch Nikon triggered the schism of the "Old Believers", who rejected the revised liturgical practices (more aligned with the Greek Church) and insisted the older, Russian rites were the only authentic tradition, and led to a bitter and often violent split.

Luther's challenge shook the church to its core, and it embarked on a Counter Reformation (sometimes called the Catholic Reformation) that altered how it operated. The Council of Trent clarified Catholic theology, curbed the abuses of indulgences,^note The quantification of indulgences was further reduced by early 20th century, and they are saved for special cases, such as the Vatican granting special indulgences in connection with the Coronavirus pandemic and the church also improved training for priests and created new religious orders, such as the Society of Jesus (often vilified by Protestant writers, thus the Evil Jesuit trope).

The Protestant Reformation ignited a century of religious conflict, as countries used religion as an excuse to perpetuate existing political and economical rivalries, and Protestant minorities rose up against their Catholic rulers. The Dutch, at the time mostly Catholics ruled by a Protestant elite, fought for 80 years against their deeply Catholic Spanish rulers after religion got mixed with economic and cultural disagreements; France was embroiled in a bloody civil war that ended with the gradual extinction of Protestantism within its frontiers; and many localized religious conflicts within the Holy Roman Empire eventually enveloped all of Continental Europe in a conflict from 1618-1648. The British Isles largely escaped the brunt of it, but were embroiled in their own conflicts that culminated in the English Civil War (1640s-1660s).

While they actually originated before Luther's theses, The Spanish Inquisition quickly switched from ferreting out secret Jews and Muslims, to ferreting out Protestant heresy in Spain. They are often credited with keeping Spain Catholic during this time, although it also factored that, despite their undoubted adherence to Rome, Catholicism in Spain was sort of its own beast, being subservient first to the Spanish monarchy and only then to the Pope, which didn't lend itself so easily to the original Protestant feelings (Spain had also undergone the "Cisnerian Reformation" the previous century, through which many of the factors that would have helped a Protestant outbreak were purged without conflict by the work of Cardinal Cisneros). This is how, for instance, Spanish kings like Charles V and Philip II would end up voluntarily warring against the Catholic Church while at the same time paradoxically calling themselves its greatest paladins. Spanish theologians actually backed this up, such as those of the School of Salamanca, but fully breaking apart like Henry VIII did was something they never were as far as to consider.

The Protestant Reformation indirectly fueled the contemporaneous Age of Exploration. Spain sought to conquer the New World in order to gain more souls for the Church, while their rival England sought to counter them. English Protestants fled persecution to North America, leading to the establishment of The Thirteen American Colonies and later The United States. It could also be said that the Exploration is the reason why the Catholic Church remains the largest denomination in the world, with the Catholic Spain and Portugal having secured big parts of the planet in their respective empires.

Another of the Reformation’s most famous long-term effects was its alleged role in the development of modern Capitalism, as Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology^note along with Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim explained on his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Protestantism (in particular Calvinism, but also what Weber called "ascetic Protestants" traditions, such as Puritanism, Lutheran Pietism, Methodism, Baptists and Quakerism) encouraged a “Protestant work ethic” centered on hard work, discipline, thrift, and worldly success, while breaking from medieval Catholic ideals which traditionally placed greater spiritual value on monasticism, contemplation, charity, and suspicion toward excessive profit-seeking and usury, while also treating religious vocations as spiritually superior to ordinary secular labor. Because many Calvinists believed in predestination, success in business and labor was sometimes interpreted as a possible sign of God’s favor, encouraging believers to work constantly, reinvest profits, and avoid excessive luxury, creating an entire culture of Workaholics. Weber argued that this attitude helped create the cultural conditions for early modern capitalism, particularly in Protestant regions such as England, Switzerland and the Netherlands, feeding the stereotype of Germanic Efficiency, though modern historians continue to debate how much of capitalism’s rise can actually be attributed to religion versus broader economic and political developments.

For extra irony, Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation, is nowadays a secular city, due to the influence of state Atheism back when the city was under communist East Germany during the Cold War. In fact, many of the Protestant nations were among the first nations in Europe to secularize. Nevertheless, there are still a handful of Lutherans in the city that keep the Reformation flame burning.

See Christianity to get a better idea of what exactly these guys were fighting about.

The Cavalier Years overlaps with the latter half of the time period, and religious warfare is often a background feature in the swashbuckling plots of this setting.

The general timeline of the Reformation started with the posting of Luther's "95 Theses" in 1517 and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648; Britain may extend it with the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the Jacobite rebellions until 1745. Meanwhile, for Czechs it usually begins a century earlier than the rest of Europe, with the death of Jan Hus in 1415 (if not earlier, with his preaching), and may end either in 1627-28 when Catholicism was proclaimed the only religion in the Habsburg Austrian Empire, or even later than in Britain with the Toleration Patent of Josef II in 1781 which marked the end of post-Thirty Year War Counter Reformation in the empire.^note To many an official's shock at the time, even over 150 years after the Emperor Ferdinand II's outlawing of Protestantism, there were large numbers of secret Protestants in the Czech lands who flocked to the Protestant churches the moment they could.

Tropes applied in fiction:

• Actual Pacifist: Many Anabaptists believed in pacifism and nonresistance to a fault, that most were persecuted out of Europe, as most live in North America and Africa in modern times. They had a better fate then the violent Anabaptists, which were mostly wiped out.
  • The Czech Unity of Brethren (one of the Czech Protestant sects pre-dating Luther) were also pacifists, although some of their members later slipped from that position in the mess that started the Thirty Years' War.
• Boring, but Practical: Reformed churches, as they were iconoclasts and favored plain and simple churches devoid of images or art.
• Corrupt Church: The Catholic Church is often portrayed as such in this period with the abuse of indulgences and petty political squabbles of displaced nobles who often unwillingly took the cloth.
• Church Militant:
  • The Reformation was sucessful enough that religious wars broke out between protestants and catholics across Europe, culminating into the bloody Thirty Years' War.
  • The Czech hussites of early 15th century are a textbook example. It all started with a Prague defenestration (amazingly, not yet the one the term was coined for), and led to some of the most embarrassing defeats medieval knights (on the Catholic side) ever experienced. The hussites under Jan Žižka introduced a number of advanced improvements on medieval warfare, including war wagons that some consider proto-tanks, and the first widespread use of firearms. (And that's why you call a pistol a pistol: look it up.) Žižka's successor in the leadership of the militant branch of the early Czech Reformation, Prokop Holý, was even actually a priest.
  • There were multiple rebellions part of the Radical Reformation, such as the Peasants' War by Thomas Müntzer and the Anabaptist Münster Rebellion, which united political revolt against the secular powers of Europe with religious fervor inspired by the Reformation.
  • The Batenburgers, also known as Zwaardgeesten (sword-minded), were a radical violent Anabaptist sect in the Netherlands which believed everything was God's property so it was fair to loot and steal other people's property, and as chosen of God, they could kill infidels with impunity. A notable contrast with the Actual Pacifist position of the other Anabaptists.
• Church Police: The Spanish Inquisition is infamously portrayed as such, hunting down religious dissidents and curbing anything that is against the church's teachings.
• Evil Jesuit: Partial Trope Codifier. The Society of Jesus was formed by the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, with the objective of travelling to Protestant-occupied regions and engage in what essentially amounted to clandestine missionary work: supporting (often secret) worship, teaching doctrine, and ingratiating themselves with local ministers in order to encourage them to convert, or at least be lenient towards Catholics. This is basically how modern-day intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, operate, making the Jesuits also the Catholic Church's unofficial proto-spy agency. So predictably, the Jesuits got demonized by Protestants as dangerous foreign subversives. The rest of the Trope Codifier comes from Catholic nations themselves and the conflict between the Catholic monarchies and the Society of Jesus a few centuries after the Reformation due their doctrine emphasizing supremacy of the Pope over the local monarch. They also caught fire in colonial Latin America for their role in education, where many Jesuit schools were distribution centers for Enlightenment ideas (which made them popular there after independence).
• The Heretic:
  • Martin Luther was condemned as a heretic after the Diet of Worms, his books were to be burned and he was declared an outlaw to be captured, and also allowed anyone to kill Luther without legal consequence. He was saved by Prince Frederick III, which hid him at Wartburg Castle.
  • Ironically, the Protestants later would condemn others as heretics to be burned at the stake. One of the most famous cases is Michael Servetus, a Spanish theologian and philosopher who denied the trinity, after being condemned by Catholics in France, he escaped to Geneva where he was also condemned by the Calvinists to be burned at the stake.
  • The Anabaptists were persecuted by both Protestants and Catholics. Unlike Calvinists, Anabaptists failed to gain recognition in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and as a result, they continued to be persecuted in Europe long after that treaty was signed.
  • The Unitarians emerged from the radical edge of the Reformation, rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity and affirming the non-Godhood of Christ and thus being viewed as heretical by both Catholic and mainstream Protestant authorities. It briefly gaining official recognition in Transylvania under the patronage of King John II Sigismund Zápolya, though this remained the only region where they were legally tolerated. Elsewhere in Europe, Unitarian movements (most notably the Polish Brethren and smaller Italian and Swiss circles) were suppressed or forced into exile, with many later fleeing to the Netherlands and England. It eventually reached a small foothold in England before later reaching Thirteen Colonies in North America, where it envolved into a liberal, Enlightenment-influenced rationalist tradition that became especially influential among segments of the early American elite.
  • Similar fate met the Czech Unity of Brethren (the precursor to the "Moravian Church".) They were originally persecuted both by the Catholics and the Utraquist Protestant majority in the Czech lands, and then, as the Treaty of Westphalia confirmed the Austrian Empire as Catholic, they were just as persecuted as other Protestants there.
• Internal Reformist:
  • Martin Luther initially tried to do this peacefully and always defended he wanted to reform rather than separate. It soon became clear that this wasn't working and Catholic Church didn't accept threats to its authority, and after he was excommunicated that Luther took a more populist approach. The faction of laymen, clergy and priests that followed him would separate the church.
    • Luther also codemned Thomas Müntzer and others, who wanted a real revolution in society, then only a reformation.
  • Desiderius Erasmus wanted to change the Church internally, but when Martin Luther launched his own campaign, he was forced to retract many of his previous reformist statements to avoid being associated with Luther's more radical position.

Works set in the time period:

In General

• Any works involving Henry VIII and the rest of The House of Tudor.
• Any works that overlap with the Thirty Years' War.

Art

• Yadegar Asisi's historical 360 degrees panorama Luther 1517◊.

Film

• The 2005 Austrian film The Headsman is about a former army captain who takes the executioner's sword after marrying the daughter of his predecessor, while dispatching Protestants, including his childhood friend, in 16th century Tyrol.
• The 2003 film Luther is a (rather inaccurate) biopic about Martin Luther that shows him first becoming disillusioned with the organization of the Catholic Church on a pilgrimage to Rome.
• The 1953 film Martin Luther is a biopic about Martin Luther that shows how over time Luther became disillusioned with the Catholic Church and how that disillusionment led to the establishment of a new church.
• The 1950s "Hussite Trilogy" (Jan Hus, Jan Žižka and Proti všem) by Czech director Otakar Vávra depicts the events of Czech Proto-Reformation in the 15th century (also rather inaccurately, which is no surprise in 1950s Czechoslovakia).
• The second and often disregarded half of the Every Sperm Is Sacred sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life takes place in the house accross the street, where a Protestant householder loudly expounds to his wife on the true meaning of the Lutheran Reformation - at great length and detail, he explains it boils down to the right to use contraceptives. Which therefore demonstrates the superiority of Protestant Christianity. A longer sequence cut from the final edit deals with The Adventures of Martin Luther, expounding the Reformation in the style of a Hollywood action-hero movie.

Literature

• Parodied in Discworld: After being brought down from their status as a state religion that threatened to go on a worldwide holy war against heretics ("heretics" being people saying the Discworld isn't a globe), the Omnians now schism so often (by nailing their theses to church doors) that there's now a waiting list (and you can't hear yourself think for all the hammering).

Music

• The first half of Sabaton's 2012 album Carolus Rex covers the Thirty Years' War from the Swedish point of view. By the 1600s, Sweden was majority-Lutheran, and thus King Gustaf II Adolf intervened in the war on the Protestant side, as the song "The Lion from the North" describes:
  A storm over Europe unleashed
  Dawn of war, a trail of destruction
  The power of Rome won't prevail
  See the Catholics shiver and shake

Tabletop Games

• The "Objectionists" in 7th Sea are a Crystal Dragon Jesus version of the Protestants, started by a Eisen monk named Mattias Lieber who in Octavus of 1517 nailed a paper calling for the reform of the Vaticine church. The paper resulted in a split in the church and the "War of the Cross", an equivalent of the Thirty Years' War.

Video Games

• Civilization V's "Into The Renaissance" scenario, which starts in the aftermath of the Great Schism, allows players to trigger the Reformation by researching Humanism.
• Europa Universalis covers the timeframe in which the Reformation took place, and has corresponding event chains for Catholic countries. The event will first create the "Protestant" faith (representing the Lutherans), which will start spreading and converting provinces to a point where some nations might adopt it as their state religion, and later the "Reformed" (representing the Calvinists) will also appear doing the same. Later expansions introduced Anglicanism, exclusive to England and Great Britain, and even added the possibility to bring the Husseites back in Bohemia.
• Pentiment takes place during the early Protestant reformation. Many characters are interested and/or are adopting in Martin Luther's teachings, leading to a social climate of conflict and rapid change.

Web Video

• A recurring subject in Lutheran Satire. The episode "The Reformation PiggyBackers'' satirizes the debates between the Reformers, as Zwingli, Calvin and Henry VIII all try to "steal the reformation" from Luther.