Reform and Conflict

From the Medieval World to the Wars of Religion, AD 1350-1648, Volume Fo

Rudoph W. Heinze, Tim Dowley

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857213945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

This volume covers a period of major change that had a lasting impact on art, science, economics, political thought, and education. Rudolph W. Heinze examines the various positions taken by medieval church reformers, explores the efforts of the leading reformer Martin Luther, and emphasises how the reformations brought moral and doctrinal changes to Christianity, permanently altering the religious landscape, then and now.

1

CHURCH AND SOCIETY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

Everywhere is woe, terror everywhere.… I am not mourning some slight distress but that dreadful year 1348, which not merely robbed us of our friends, but robbed the whole world of its peoples…. Will posterity credit that there was a time when … almost the whole earth was depopulated? … Can it be that God has no care for the mortal lot?

Francisco Petrarch¹

Now, indeed, may every thoughtful spirit thank God that it has been permitted him to be born in this new age, so full of hope and promise, which already rejoices in a greater army of nobly-gifted souls than the world has seen in the thousand years that have preceded it.

Matteo Palmieri²

Late medieval people lived in a world of striking contrasts. It was an era of death and disaster when many felt they were living in the end times, but it was also an era of creativity, expansion, and hope for a brighter future. The above statements, both of which were written by medieval humanists, exemplify the paradox. At the beginning of this period, Francisco Petrarch (1304–1374) lamented the terror of the Black Death, which took such an enormous toll of human life and brought so much suffering. At the end of the period, Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) was one of many humanist scholars who felt they were living in a wonderful age of cultural “rebirth,” which historians have called the Renaissance. Both the disasters and the achievements of the age were to have a profound effect on the church, and to understand the history of the Christian church in the late Middle Ages, one must first look at the environment in which it ministered. The way in which the church ministered to that society is discussed in the second half of this chapter.

The Calamities of the Late Middle Ages

The fourteenth century has been labeled “calamitous,”³ and there could hardly be a more fitting adjective to describe a period when the people of Europe were afflicted by a series of terrible natural and man-made disasters. Climatologists have identified a gradual shift to a colder and wetter climate that reached its most severe point in the mid-fourteenth century, and climate changes resulted in a number of serious problems. Although the average temperature fell only slightly, it was enough to cause major floods, a shorter growing season, and crop failures. A particularly serious crop failure occurred in 1315, when the summer rainfall became such a deluge that chroniclers compared it with the Old Testament flood. Crops failed throughout Europe, resulting in famines so severe that there were grim reports of people eating their own children and the bodies of hanged criminals. Floods, heavy snowfalls, and colder temperatures persisted throughout the century, and as if that was not enough, swarms of locusts and earthquakes added to the misery of the people of Europe. It is not surprising that many thought the final judgment and return of Christ were imminent.

Natural disasters contributed to economic problems. The previous two centuries had witnessed significant economic expansion, as new land was brought under cultivation while urbanization and commerce flourished. By the fourteenth century, however, all the land that could productively be brought under cultivation had been used, and the amount of land under cultivation actually declined as some marginal land had to be abandoned because it could not bear continued usage. Climate change further undermined the land’s productivity. The expanding economy of the previous period, which had brought much prosperity to Europe, was replaced by a depression that added to the hardship of the masses and resulted in significant social tensions. In the cities, guilds were closed to new members, while in the countryside nobles sought to impose heavier burdens on the peasantry. Unemployment and underemployment resulted in a declining standard of living for the masses of Europe, and the economic oppression of the power elite finally became unbearable, resulting in a series of urban and peasant revolts. At the beginning of the century, discontented workers rose against their oppressors in Flanders and Northern Italy. In 1378 Florence experienced a major revolt of poor laborers, who even seized control of the city for a period. Rural discontent led to peasant revolts in France in 1358 and England in 1381. Although some lower-class revolts had temporary success, the ruling classes were able to suppress them and impose even heavier burdens upon the poor.

The problems of the late Middle Ages were complicated by the man-made tragedy of war. Late medieval warfare was particularly destructive to the civilian population because armies lived off the land, looting, raping, and sometimes massacring the local population. A retreating army often practiced a scorched-earth policy, destroying crops and fields in order to demoralize a hostile population and deny the advancing army food supplies. Soldiers were normally recruited from the lower classes and were paid very little—sometimes nothing—so they had to rely on the spoils of war for subsistence. When a war was over, armies were disbanded as soon as possible, resulting in roving bands of ex-soldiers plaguing the countryside. Such banditry only added to the misery of the population and the turmoil of the era. France and Italy were particularly troubled by such banditry because of the almost constant wars that afflicted those areas.

In 1337 England and France, two of the most prosperous and advanced countries in Western Europe, began a war that lasted for over a hundred years. Although this conflict was temporarily halted by a number of truces, lasting peace was not finally restored until 1453, and it left one of the richest areas of Europe devastated, with a particularly disastrous effect on the peasantry. A French diarist, describing the plight of the peasants, decried the atrocities committed by the English forces and their Burgundian allies in what had been one of the most prosperous areas of France. They were, he stated, “pillaging everywhere, so … it was impossible to till the soil or sow anywhere … most of the peasants abandoned work in the fields and were in despair.” Complaints were greeted with mockery “and their men behaved worse even than before,” so that the peasants complained that “Saracens would treat us better than the Christians do.”⁴ After the Hundred Years’ War ended, England went on to experience civil war, the so-called “Wars of the Roses,” which did not end until 1485 and provided new military opportunities for the English soldiers who had fought in the Hundred Years’ War.

Italian cities likewise engaged in almost continuous wars. Cities fought each other, and factions within cities fought civil wars. When one faction was defeated, its leaders were expelled and their property confiscated. From exile, they plotted their return and, when and if they were strong enough, attacked and deposed their opponents, further disrupting the life of the city. The folly of war was evident to sensitive people such as Petrarch. Commenting on a war between Florence and Pisa in 1372, he told the story of “a fool” who questioned the rationality of war: “Would that our warmakers might ponder his words! So might a war never be begun, or it might be ended before we should sink under war’s ravages and calamities, after which indeed peace will come. That peace will be good, though it be all too late; it would be much the best, if it could come in time. But men’s ears are shut against wise counsels. The ultimate triumph of war, they say, is total madness.”⁵

North of the Alps, Germany was also afflicted by “total madness.” What is today Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by an elected emperor who was constantly struggling against centrifugal forces in his empire. Civil wars raged between rival claimants to the throne, and in the course of those wars, the emperor’s authority was diminished even further as local authorities gained increasing power at his expense. Although the Golden Bull of 1378⁶ regularized the method of electing the emperor, the empire continued to be divided, without a strong central authority.

The troubles of the emperor were complicated by a new threat from the East that increased as the period progressed. During the previous two centuries, Western armies had launched a series of military expeditions against the Muslim rulers of the Near East. Although these Crusades had some initial success, resulting in the establishment of Western crusader states in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, the Muslims gradually regained the territory they had lost, and by 1291 the last of the crusader states was eliminated with the fall of Acre. Muslim success against Western armies led one disillusioned crusader to lament that “God who used to keep watch over us is now asleep, but Mahomet works with all his might.”⁷ From a Western perspective, God slept for two centuries as Muslim advances continued at the expense of the eastern Holy Roman Empire, which had survived for almost a millennium after the fall of the western empire.

The new enemies of the Holy Roman Empire were the Ottoman Turks, who emerged from a small emirate in the late thirteenth century to become the primary power in the Balkans in the next two centuries. Their gradual conquest of the Balkan Peninsula took place under a series of able military leaders and involved a number of humiliating defeats for the Christian rulers of the area. One of the worst defeats occurred at the Battle of Kossovo in 1389, where the Turks defeated a combined force of Serbs and troops from other Balkan states and killed most of the Serbian nobility. When the West became alarmed and counterattacked with a new Crusade, they were annihilated at Nicopolis in 1396. The humiliation was accentuated by the fact that important figures, including a marshal of France, the heir to the Duke of Burgundy, and two cousins of the French king, were taken captive and huge ransoms had to be paid to secure their release. Although the Mongol leader, Tamerlane, who defeated the Turks at Angora in 1402, temporarily halted the Turkish advance, it resumed again under the aggressive leadership of Sultan Mohammed II in the second half of the fifteenth century.

Constantinople, the capital of a once mighty empire, which was now only a shadow of its former glory, finally fell to the Turks in 1453. Although this had long been expected, the West was shocked and the pope called for another Crusade. Nothing came of this, however, and the Turkish advance into the Balkans continued as Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, and Bosnia were incorporated into the Turkish Empire. In 1480 the Turks even occupied the Italian city of Otranto, but the king of Naples quickly recaptured it. Mohammed II died the following year, and the West had a temporary respite from Turkish attacks as the Turks fought their own internal battles⁸ and set about the conquest of Syria and Egypt. In 1520 Suleiman the Magnificent resumed the advance. Six years later, the king of Bohemia and Hungary was killed at the Battle of Mohacs and the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. Throughout the Reformation era, the Turkish menace, described as “the scourge of God,” was part of the rhetoric of Reformers and political leaders. As we shall see, it would have a major impact on the Reformation.

The Black Death

At the same time as the people of Europe were suffering the calamities of weather, war, revolts, and depression, they also faced a still more serious problem that killed more of the European population than the sum of all the other disasters. It came without warning and without the people of that society really knowing what was happening. The Black Death first reached Europe in 1347. It probably began in China and spread across Russia to the Crimea, where the Tartars were besieging the Genoese trading post in the city of Caffa. The infection began in the Tartar camp, and the Tartars spread the plague to the besieged garrison by catapulting the bodies of the dead into the city. When the Genoese fled, they took with them the plague, and by the time their ship reached Messina in Sicily, most of the crew were dead or dying. Thus the plague made its entry into Europe, where it spread quickly and easily, as people had no natural immunity. In the three years between 1348 and 1351, the plague swept across the whole of Europe, taking a terrible toll on its population. Although it abated temporarily, new outbreaks occurred in 1362 and 1375, and during the next century the plague returned at least once every decade.

The plague was spread by fleas that lived on black rats. When fleas bit a human, a pustule formed at the point of the bite. By the third day, the lymph nodes began to swell and hemorrhaging occurred under the skin. The infected person suffered excruciating pain, neurological disorders, wild anxiety, and terror, from which death was a blessed relief. In addition to the bubonic form, which affected the lymph nodes, a pneumonic strain also developed that was even more contagious. Contemporaries called it “the pestilence,” but five centuries later a German historian gave it the name the Black Death,⁹ not because people turned black (although the victims did have black spots or blotches due to bleeding under the skin), but because it was so frightening as a result of its virulence. It spread easily from person to person, so that if a person came into contact even with the clothes of sick people, he or she was likely to be infected. Priests and doctors who came to minister to the sick often died, and many people became so fearful that they avoided the sick, whose suffering was thereby increased. In many instances it was the most caring clergy who died, because it was they who ministered to the sick and dying. One fortunate survivor was a fourteenth-century Mother Teresa, named Catherine of Siena. When the plague struck her hometown of Siena, Italy, in 1374, she and her followers ignored the danger to themselves and continued to minister to the plague victims.

We do not know how many people died, because detailed death statistics were nonexistent in the fourteenth century. However, evidence from surviving documents such as manorial rolls, ordination lists, and city records makes it possible to estimate the likely death rate. On the basis of such evidence, it is believed that one third of the population of Europe may have died in the three years 1347–1350, although recent historians have argued that the death toll was even higher. Death rates were worse in the cities and towns, where people lived in very crowded conditions and sanitation was especially poor. Sometimes there were not enough people left alive in a town to bury the dead. At the height of the plague, average life expectancy, which had been thirty-four in 1300, fell to seventeen. Although some historians are not convinced that society suffered major psychological damage, it is difficult to believe that the Black Death did not have a significant impact on the overall outlook of the society. No modern war has caused anywhere near the proportion of deaths that resulted from the plague, and we know how profoundly the death rates of the two twentieth-century world wars affected Western society. The psychological effect must have been all the worse in a society in which people had no idea why they were suffering or how to combat the plague. People waited helplessly for the onset of the disease or, if they fled hoping to escape it, they often only spread it to new areas.

A deeply religious society struggled to explain why God was allowing his people to suffer so terribly. Petrarch was not alone in asking the question, “Can it be that God has no care for the mortal lot?” It seemed that God had turned against his people and nobody knew why. Some thought God was punishing Christian society for its sins, and there were those who felt they could take upon themselves the punishment for that society. In 1349 the town of Tournai witnessed the spectacle of about two hundred people beating themselves and each other with rods and whips to atone for the sins of society. Called Flagellants, they first appeared in 1260, when Europe was suffering an earlier series of disasters. A new wave of flagellant groups appeared in 1349, in response to the Black Death, and spread throughout much of present-day Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and parts of eastern France. They were banned by Pope Clement VI in 1349 and officially condemned by the Council of Constance in the following century.

Flagellants were one of the strange responses to the plague, but they hurt only themselves. Other people blamed the Jews for the suffering of society, and large numbers of Jews were massacred by angry mobs in 1348–1349. Such massacres were often linked with the appearance of Flagellants. In Mainz, where the largest Jewish community in Germany lived, a massacre started in the midst of a Flagellant meeting, and the entire Jewish community was killed. Often the authorities did little to help the Jews, and those who did were often attacked themselves.

Fortunately these aberrant responses were not universal. In fact, many people were drawn closer to the church. At a time when death was so prevalent, it is not surprising that people thought more seriously about the afterlife and the way they could assure themselves of it. There was a higher involvement in church life in the late Middle Ages, and as we shall see, practices associated with life after death became especially popular.

The Renaissance

At the same time that Europe was suffering these terrible calamities, it also experienced great cultural vitality. The period has often been called the Renaissance, a French word meaning “rebirth.” At one time historians believed the culture and learning of the classical period were “reborn” at the end of what was often called the “Dark Ages.” They regarded the Middle Ages as a dark, unenlightened period when culture stagnated and the learning of classical antiquity was lost. The idea of a Renaissance was also tied to the Reformation because it was believed that once learning was reborn and people began to think for themselves, they rebelled against the shackles of a church that had held them in subjugation and told them what to think. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jakob Burkhardt viewed the Renaissance as the period that gave birth to the modern world, and he stressed that during this period the modern ideas of individuality and the pursuit of fame emerged.¹⁰ Although this interpretation was based on a faulty understanding of the Middle Ages and a failure to appreciate its cultural achievements, clearly there was a great outburst of cultural creativity and increased interest in classical studies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that helped transform learning in Western Europe and had a major impact on the Reformation.

As we have already noted, those living during the late Middle Ages, such as Matteo Palmieri, sometimes thought of themselves as living in an age of enlightenment and rebirth or recovery of the classical heritage. Contemporary writers such as Petrarch (1304–1374), Boccaccio (1313–1375), and Vasari (1511–1574) used similar metaphors of rebirth and renewal to describe the age in which they were living. The recovery of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise for Reform and Conflict
• Table of Contents
• Maps and Illustrations
• Preface
• Writing the History of the Reformation
• 1: Church and Society in the Late Middle Ages
• 2: Reform and Conflict in the Late Medieval Church
• 3: Martin Luther and the Origin of the Lutheran Reformation
• 4: The Consolidation and Spread of the Lutheran Reformation
• 5: The Urban Reformation: Zurich, Basel, and Strasbourg
• 6: The Radical Reformation
• 7: Calvin and Calvinism
• 8: Origins of the English Reformation
• 9: The Scottish Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement
• 10: The Catholic Reformation
• 11: Women and the Reformation
• 12: Non-Western Churches and Missionary Enterprises
• 13: Theological Conflict, Confessions, and Confessionalization
• 14: A Century of Military Conflict
• 15: The Impact of the Reformation
• Time Line
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Notes
• Index