The Peace of Augsburg and the Meckhart Confession

Moderate Religion in an Age of Militancy

Adam Glen Hough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429537127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Taking the religiously diverse city of Augsburg as its focus, this book explores the underappreciated role of local clergy in mediating and interpreting the Peace of Augsburg in the decades following its 1555 enactment, focusing on the efforts of the preacher Johann Meckhart and his heirs in blunting the cultural impact of confessional religion. It argues that the real drama of confessionalization was not simply that which played out between princes and theologians, or even, for that matter, between religions; rather, it lay in the daily struggle of clerics in the proverbial trenches of their ministry, who were increasingly pressured to choose for themselves and for their congregations between doctrinal purity and civil peace.

1 Introduction

The imperial free city of Augsburg first moved to adopt the Protestant Reformation in 1534, a process that seemed all but complete three years later when its Catholic churches and monasteries were closed, and its clergy forced to leave the city. While the city’s evangelical clergy and citizenry could never quite decide on what form of Protestantism to adopt, their shared aversion of Catholicism surpassed their need for evangelical uniformity. Reforming influences from the early centers of the Reformation—Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Zurich—all mixed freely in this city, with most disputes over religion being mild, and typically confined to the ministry. This arrangement lasted for about a decade, at which point Augsburg, like many of the Protestant cities and territories of the Holy Roman Empire, went to war against Emperor Charles V, in large part to protect the gains that the Reformation had made. This was the Schmalkaldic War, which lasted from July 1546 through May 1547, ending in a decisive victory for Charles and his mostly Catholic and imperial allies.

This war was a significant event for Augsburg, which was a very important city in the economy and politics of sixteenth-century Germany. It was a powerful center of banking and international trade, and before the war, in fact even during it, some of the city’s richest citizens were among the emperor’s chief financial backers. That Augsburg had adopted the Protestant religion, and, worse, that it had joined the rebellion against the Emperor, was a grave insult to not only Charles but also to his Catholic allies in the region, particularly the exiled Bishop of Augsburg, as well as the duke of Bavaria, whose territory literally surrounded the imperial city.

In the aftermath of the war, the city was treated harshly. It was occupied by the emperor’s armies and forced to pay steep reparations. Its ancient guild-government was dissolved, replaced instead by a patrician-led one that was dominated by Catholics. To deal with the Protestant problem, which Charles had come to believe was the cause of his subjects’ rebelliousness, the emperor decreed a transitional period in which evangelicals would be forced to convert back to Catholicism. This was called the Augsburg Interim, and it lasted from 1548 to 1555. For all intents and purposes, it was a full return to Catholicism, with a few minor concessions. In many places, however, the extent and degree to which the Interim was implemented depended on a city’s complicity in the uprising. Nuremburg, for example, was very much a Lutheran city, but it had chosen to stay out of the war, a fact that largely spared it from having to implement the Interim. Augsburg, however, needed to be made an example of, and there, the Interim was implemented to the letter. After an initial round of departures and clerical expulsions, what remained of the city’s evangelical ministry tried to negotiate this implementation with local politicians, hoping to soften these reprisals and hold on to certain key aspects of their religion. Ultimately, however, when imperial and papal agents in the city caught wind of these negotiations, they intervened, banishing Augsburg’s Protestant ministry, leaving the entire city—a city of about 30,000 to 40,000 people, about 80% of whom were evangelical—without religious ministration.

In the year that followed, the winds of fortune changed, and Charles found himself on the defensive facing a second rebellion, this time led by one of his former allies, Moritz of Saxony, now allied with the King of France. Realizing that the Reformation could not be turned back without ruinous bloodshed, he struck a treaty at the town of Passau in 1552, essentially recognizing the rights of rulers to set the religious worship of their territories. This Treaty of Passau was the foundation of its more famous successor, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. With respect to Augsburg and a number of other imperial cities, what these decrees did was provide a framework for religious, or “confessional” coexistence going forward. In free imperial cities with mixed-confessional populations, both Catholicism and the Protestant Augsburg Confession were recognized as legally protected religions. Such cities became what are called bi-confessional cities, Augsburg being the largest and most important of these.

1.1 The 1584 Calendar Riot and the End of an Era

Respecting the period immediately following the Peace of Augsburg, relatively little has been written about the context and course of religious pluralism in Augsburg, at least not before the 1580s, by which point cracks in the city’s bi-confessional peace become increasingly evident. The most famous of these cracks formed out of the effort by Pope Gregory XIII, in concert with the emperor, to update the antiquated Julian calendar. These calendar reforms rather quickly became the central locus of a worsening confessional conflict in Augsburg until, in the spring of 1584, they served as part of the catalyst, at least, for an armed uprising by the city’s Protestants. This event is known as the Calendar Riot. Although it ends up being a somewhat restrained riot with likely only a few deaths, it was nevertheless a traumatic experience, leading to some very harsh reprisals and social and religious reforms—and eventually, in 1586, resulting in a new expulsion of the evangelical ministry.

For the Augsburg historian Bernd Roeck, the trauma of this Kalenderstreit marks the beginning of an epochal transition, particularly insofar as he sees it initiating, or at the very least intensifying, a process generally known to early modern historians as “confessionalization.” This concept was first propounded by Wolfgang Reinhard for the early sixteenth century, though later developed significantly for a post-Tridentine context by Heinz Schilling.¹ This confessionalization paradigm, broadly speaking, attempts to explain the processes by which centralizing secular states appropriated and incorporated defined religious communities (i.e. those with clearly articulated statements of doctrine) within their legal jurisdiction and collective identity. Significantly, one of the most important sociological effects of this process was a clear move towards the creation of heterodox religious polities—a process that was predicated as much on building up certain identities as it was on demonizing others. In Roeck, the Calendar Controversy of the 1580s facilitates just such a process insofar as it imbued long-standing social and economic crises with confessional significance, with both religious and political actors cultivating awareness of external confessional differences as a way of making sense of economic and social inequalities and hardships.²

Methodologically, Roeck argues for a pairing of what he calls “event history” (Ereignisgeschichte) with structural, social history. He insists that to study an event or even a city, we have to place these within their proper historical context, taking into consideration underlying trends and context that might not seem immediately relevant at first glance. In this case, he is interested in explaining a complex religious dynamic in reference to prolonged social and economic instability. This approach is compelling for a number of reasons, but especially because it recognizes the artificiality of analytical compartmentalization. Religion, he argues, should not be studied in a vacuum, but must be considered alongside the concerns of everyday life, which, in the right circumstances, could influence the shape and intensity of early modern religiosity. Accordingly, I have endeavored here to be mindful of the ways in which the stresses of social, economic, political, and even environmental crises could manifest in unexpected and profound ways. While my interest will be primarily in the cultural struggle waged by clerics in service to their religious and political agendas, I recognize that these men were not only aware of the previously mentioned crises and their impact on their congregations, but that they, too, experienced these and were influenced by them. What’s more, I agree with Roeck that the Calendar Riot marked an important point of rupture in Augsburg’s history. Where I disagree, however, is with his tendency to characterize the riot as the beginning of confessionalization. By setting the preceding three decades explicitly within the binary cultural paradigm established by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, I will argue that the riot was, in fact, a consequence of the formation and polarization of two distinct, competing religious communities in Augsburg. Put another way, I argue that this riot does not represent the beginning of confessionalization, but its fulfillment.

1.2 Clerics and Confession

As will be shown, there has been some interesting and excellent scholarly work on the city’s social and political landscape during this post-Peace confessional period. What noticeably remains missing, however, is a substantive treatment of Augsburg’s ministry—its clerics and their works, and how they factor into our cultural understanding of religious conflict and peace. Typical of the historiography is the notion that this middle period of the sixteenth century preceding the riot was supposed to be one of remarkable religious coexistence. What I set out to uncover was whether this, indeed, was the case, and the extent to which the city’s clerics—particularly its ministers but in one chapter also its priests—actually promoted either coexistence or conflict. I wanted to try to understand, moreover, whether the bitter religious animosity that I encountered in the two periods bookending my study—the Augsburg Interim and the Calendar Riot—were anomalous, or if they were part of a larger and longer pattern.

Accordingly, this is what I set out to do; foremost, I set out to actually read what these clerics were writing and preaching. There has been almost no new work on these preachers in the last century, but, in fact, some of them wrote a great deal, and a significant number of their printed treatises and sermons have survived. In Augsburg’s archives, moreover, a great number of manuscript sources and correspondence has survived respecting internal controversies and discussions pertaining to the city’s bi-confessional situation.

Within these sources, I specifically looked for clues as to how identities and the manipulation thereof factored into bi-confessional relations, and I looked very closely at the symbols and rhetoric used by these clerics in their pastoral and theological discourse, and within their significant polemical output. Drawing on Roeck, one of my early hypotheses was that in periods where social unrest and economic deprivation were most pronounced, confessional identities would become more prominent, and the relationship between these nominal, competing religious communities would become more strained. To better understand the contexts underlying the clerical discourse I was analyzing, therefore, I spent a good deal of time looking at city chronicles, at trial and interrogation records, and at works produced by public servants. I also read epic poems about inflation; I read plague treatises, and I read a lot about exorcisms and the supernatural. After all this, I am convinced that my initial hypothesis is correct—that religious coexistence does in fact become more tenuous during times of uncertainty and crisis, periods that were plentiful between 1551 and 1586, recurring almost every few years. But, it was unclear why this was happening. While these crises contributed to the decline of confessional peace, I am not convinced, ultimately, that they were responsible for it. For that answer, I turned back to the clerics themselves.

One of the debates among historians of Augsburg concerns the religious identity of the city’s evangelicals during the Reformation. Many historians, drawing from early-twentieth-century works, see them to differing degrees as Zwinglians, which is to say, Protestants according to the Swiss rites and doctrines. A few historians see them as simply Lutheran, with a few nonconformists in their midst. A third camp associates them with Martin Bucer’s negotiated, Upper-Germany reformation, almost a middle point between Luther and Zwingli. Historiographically, this is a really interesting debate, at least up until 1555. Beyond this date, the consensus is largely that all of these evangelicals became, or start to become, Lutherans—the form of Protestantism that eventually gets associated exclusively with the Augsburg Confession, the one legally protected form of Protestantism protected by the Peace of Augsburg.

What I set out to discover was whether the kinds of conversations about identity that we find in the historiography were also present in the clerical discourse I was reading. As it turns out, they were. In fact, the construction, manipulation, and institutionalization of confessional identities are central themes of this discourse, and, I argue, central to understanding the deterioration of the ideals of bi-confessional coexistence that were to have been protected by the Peace of Augsburg. What’s more, I came to the realization that the explicitly bi-confessional cultural paradigm established by the Peace, in the context of intense and focused efforts by a diverse array of confessional agents and institutions to control the city, created a situation in which cultural-religious polarization was actually promoted as a means by which to overcome intra-confessional diversity.

1.3 Title and Terms

I titled this work The Peace of Augsburg and the Meckhart Confession: Moderation in an Age of Militancy, and a consideration of these terms seems in order.

The Peace of Augsburg was many things, most famously an event that produced a decree of tremendous import for the development of early modern Europe. One of my central interests lies in trying to understand the practical application of bi-confessional coexistence in the religiously diverse city of Augsburg. As significant as 1555 was as a moment in the development of inter-religious coexistence, though, I extend my understanding of the Peace well beyond the act of its initial institution to include its maintenance and cultivation over a period of decades. Ergo, my use of the “Peace of Augsburg” in this work speaks not only to a legal framework but also to a cultural aspiration that spanned generations. While the Peace came into being out of the 1555 Diet of Augsburg, chronologically, my interest in it spans its genesis in the tumult of the later 1540s and early 1550s right through to the 1580s, during which latter period I see the Peace transform fully from a civic-religious ideal into a tool of confessionalization.

To understand the subsequent terms of my title, I will introduce them in reverse order, be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 That Forgotten Place Between Heaven and Hell: Resistance and Compromise During the Augsburg Interim
• 3 The Sin Unconfessed: Meckhart and the Act of Confession
• 4 Dance of the Augsburg Preachers: The Melhorn Controversy and the Culture of Confessionalization
• 5 The Meckhart Confession: Negotiating Moderation
• 6 A Rudderless Ship in Stormy Seas: Conflict, Crisis, and Concord at the Dawn of the Confessional Age
• 7 Hellhounds in the House of Fugger
• 8 The Path of Resistance: Augsburg’s Divergent Evangelical Responses to the Counter Reformation
• 9 The Calendar Riot: Conceptually Expanded, Contextually Explored
• 10 Caught in No-Man’s-Land: The Vocation Controversy
• 11 Conclusion
• Index