A Faith Divided
Because inner freedom depends on outer security, Protestantism, in its years of safety, split into many branches by its own faith in individual judgment and the independence of conscience. In 1525 Luther wrote that the number of sects and creeds now equaled the number of men. Melanchthon, alarmed and sad, tried to moderate his master's methods and find a way to agreement and unity among the quarreling Protestant parties. The Catholics seized on the insults the Protestant sects traded and predicted that freedom of interpretation and belief would lead to religious anarchy, the breakdown of morals and skepticism, which Protestants and Catholics alike detested. In 1525 three artists were expelled from Protestant Nuremberg for doubting the authenticity of Scripture and denying Christ's real presence in the bread and wine of the Supper, and Christ's divinity.
Speyer and the "Protest"
While Suleiman the Magnificent was preparing his attack on Hungary, the princes, prelates and mayors of Germany met in a diet at Speyer (June 1526) to consider the Catholics' demand that the Edict of Worms be enforced, and the Protestants' counter-proposal that religious freedom be observed until a council of Germans could examine the disputes. The Diet of Speyer, in which the Protestants had a majority, rejected a council on the Protestant-Catholic differences and voted that each German state be free to follow its own creed, that no one be punished for past disobedience to the Edict of Worms, and that both parties preach God's word freely without interfering with each other. The Protestants welcomed the "recess" of Speyer because it gave legal standing to the Lutheran churches, gave German princes absolute religious authority in their territories and barred the Catholic Mass in Protestant lands. The Catholics refused to accept it. The emperor, then at odds with the pope, agreed provisionally; Ferdinand, soon grappling with Hungarian affairs, could not prevent the recess from being carried out.
After reconciling with Clement, Charles resumed the natural conservatism of kings and ordered the Diet of Speyer to meet again on February 1, 1529. The new diet, under the influence of the archduke and the absent emperor, revoked its earlier decisions and passed a resolution allowing Lutheran assemblies where they existed but requiring Protestants to leave Catholics free in their states, absolutely forbidding Lutheran preaching and rites in Catholic territories, making the Edict of Worms binding and declaring Zwinglian and Anabaptist sects illegal everywhere. The followers of Luther in a declaration (April 25, 1529) "protested" that the second recess was unacceptable to them and that they would in any case carry out the first. In the same document they asked the emperor to call a general council of the Church. From then on Catholics called the signers of this protest "Protestants," and gradually the name was given to the German rebels who had separated from the Church of Rome.
The Augsburg Confession
Charles, who still needed German unity against the Turkish attack, called another diet, presided over by himself, at Augsburg (June 20, 1530). During the diet the emperor stayed in the house of Anton Fugger, then head of the firm that had made him emperor. According to an old story, the financier, to please the emperor, burned the emperor's note of debt to the Fuggers. Since the Fuggers were allies of the pope, this gesture by Anton may have brought Charles closer to the pope. Luther, still under the emperor's ban and liable to arrest, did not attend, but went to Coburg on the Saxon border and kept in touch with the Protestant delegates by messengers. He compared the Diet of Augsburg to the jackdaws croaking behind his window and said that each bishop had brought as many devils to vote in the assembly as fleas stick to a dog on St. John's day. It was apparently at this time that he composed his famous hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
On June 24 Cardinal Campeggio asked the diet to put hard pressure on the Protestant sects. The next day, Christian Beyer presented to the diet in the emperor's presence, and before a group of delegates, the Augsburg Confession, drawn up by Melanchthon and, with slight changes, the basis of the Lutheran creed. Melanchthon was a conciliatory, peace-loving man, and afraid of a joint attack by pope and emperor on the divided Protestants, so he wrote the declaration in a "quiet, soft and peaceable tone," as a Catholic scholar says, trying to minimize the differences between Catholics and Protestants. He condemned those whom both Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians (Luther's followers called themselves "evangelical" because they based their faith on the Gospel) rejected, and denied any tie between the followers of Luther and Zwingli. He also softened the Protestant teaching on predestination, transubstantiation and justification by faith, and spoke gently of the corruption of the Church that Protestants had risen to uproot. With courtesy and care he spoke of the need to administer the sacrament in both kinds, to abolish monasticism, and to let clergy marry, and asked Cardinal Campeggio to examine the Confession with the same peaceableness with which it was composed. Luther, though he disliked some concessions it made to Catholics, reluctantly approved. Zwingli, in his Exposition of the Faith sent to the emperor, openly denied Christ's real presence in the Supper. The four cities of Strasbourg, Constance, Lindau and Memmingen, where Capito and Bucer were trying to bring Lutheran, Zwinglian and Catholic thought together, submitted another confession to the diet.
The extreme Catholic party, led by Eck, drew up so harsh a refutation that the diet refused to present it to the emperor before it had been revised twice. Even after the refutation was softened, the party insisted on belief in transubstantiation, the seven sacraments, the intercession of saints, clerical celibacy, Communion in bread alone as the Roman Church did, and the Latin Mass. Charles approved the refutation and warned the Protestants either to accept it or prepare for war. The moderate Catholic party opened talks with Melanchthon and said it was ready to allow Communion in both bread and wine. Melanchthon in return agreed to confession, church festivals, the legal authority of bishops, and even, to some extent, papal supremacy. Other Protestant leaders refused to retreat so far. Luther also objected, declaring that restoring the bishops' authority would again subject the clergy to Rome and end the Reformation. Some Protestant princes, seeing no hope of agreement, went home.
On November 19 the diet, now reduced by the departure of some Protestants, issued its final recess. It condemned every aspect of Protestantism, made the decrees of Worms binding, ordered the imperial court to act against those who had seized church property, and required Protestants to accept the extreme Catholic refutation peacefully by April 15, 1531. Charles's signature made the recess of Augsburg an imperial edict. The emperor evidently judged the six-month deadline useful to give the rebels time to prepare to accept it; he gave them immunity in the meantime, and meant, once the deadline had passed, if his other troubles allowed, to lay their heads in the dust on the battlefield.
The Schmalkaldic League
Before the diet ended, several German states formed a Catholic league to defend and strengthen the Catholic faith. Protestant princes and cities, seeing it as a military pact to crush Protestants, formed in turn the Schmalkaldic League (March 1531). When Charles's six months were up, Ferdinand, now "King of the Romans," proposed that Charles declare war on the German Protestants. But Charles was not yet ready. Suleiman was preparing another attack on Vienna; Khair ad-Din Barbarossa, the sultan's Algerian ally, was endangering Christian merchant ships in the Mediterranean with his fleet; and Francis, Suleiman's French ally, was waiting for the day when, using Charles's entanglement in German civil war, he could march on Milan. In April 1531 Charles shelved the Augsburg recess and instead asked the Protestants for help against the Turks. Luther and the Protestant princes answered favorably. Lutherans and Catholics made peace at Nuremberg (June 23, 1532) and promised to help Ferdinand and to live in peace until a general council. Suleiman, meeting the strong force of German Protestants and Catholics and Spanish and Italian Catholics stationed at Vienna, found the situation so unfavorable that he went straight back to Constantinople. After the sultan's retreat the Christian soldiers, drunk with their easy and bloodless victory, plundered Christian towns and houses, and according to the Englishman Thomas Cranmer, who saw it, "they did worse than the Turks could have done." Protestant patriotism gave their movement new strength. When Aleander, as papal envoy, asked them whether they would attend a general council to defend their views, he got a refusal.
The next year (1534), Philip of Hesse, ignoring Luther's opposition to a policy of force and aggression, with French help restored Ulrich to the duchy of Württemberg. Ferdinand's power there collapsed, churches were plundered, monasteries closed and their property seized by the state. Circumstances again favored the Protestants: Ferdinand in the east and Charles in the west were occupied; the Anabaptists seemed to be preparing a communist revolution at Münster; the radicals under Jürgen Wullenwever had taken Lübeck (1535); Catholic princes now needed the Lutherans' help both against internal rebellion and against the Ottoman attack. Moreover the Scandinavian countries and England were now separated from Rome, and Catholic France was working for an alliance with Lutheran Germany against Charles V.
The Schmalkaldic League, proud of its strength, decided to raise an army of 12,000 men. When the new pope, Paul III, asked on what terms the League would take part in a general council, the League answered that it would attend only if the council were independent of the pope, composed of German church and civil leaders, and if Protestants were admitted not as heretics but as members equal to the others. The League also declared the imperial court without jurisdiction, told the emperor's vice-chancellor that it did not recognize Catholic ownership of church property and would not let Catholics hold religious assemblies in the lands of Protestant princes. The Catholic states renewed their union and asked Charles to use the powers of the imperial court to the fullest. The emperor agreed, but Francis I's threat kept him from decisive action. The Protestants' strength steadily grew. A Catholic historian writes: on September 9, 1538, Aleander wrote the pope from Linz that the religious situation in Germany had grown very bad, that prayer and the sacraments were abandoned in most places, and that the German princes, except Ferdinand I, had either turned Lutheran or hated the clergy and coveted church lands; church leaders did not stop their extravagance; the Christian orders were declining; and the few clergy left were so sunk in ignorance, corruption and worldliness that the few remaining Catholics shunned them.
After Duke George of Albertine Saxony died, his Lutheran brother Henry took his place and in turn yielded to Maurice, the military defender of Protestantism in Germany. In 1539 Joachim II, elector of Brandenburg, set up in Berlin a Protestant church independent of Rome and Wittenberg. In 1542 the bishopric of Naumburg and even Halle, Albert's see, were joined by war and politics to the Protestant zone of Germany (the book's wording is garbled; this is reconstructed); and in 1543 Count Hermann von Wied, elector-archbishop of Cologne, shook Rome by turning to Lutheranism.
Regensburg and the Last Attempt
Protestant leaders were not so sure of themselves: in January 1540 Luther, Melanchthon and some co-religionists declared that peace was possible only if the emperor and Catholic clergy abandoned "error and idolatry" and accepted the "pure belief" of the Augsburg Confession. The declaration continued: even if the pope accepted our beliefs and rites, we should have to treat him as a persecutor and outcast, for he will not give up his errors in other men's lands; there is no hope left for the pope, just as there is none for his god, Satan. Charles partly met the Protestants' conditions, for in April 1540 he took the religious initiative from the pope and called Protestant and Catholic leaders of Germany to Worms to end their quarrel by discussion. The Protestants' influence in Germany had reached such a point that the pope's envoy wrote, "If the pope himself does not act decisively, all Germany will fall into the hands of the Protestants." Long talks between Eck and Melanchthon led to the former intransigent Catholic agreeing that the moderate view of the Augsburg Confession be tried. Encouraged, Charles summoned the two parties to Regensburg to continue.
At the Regensburg meeting, presided over by the emperor himself (April 5 to May 22, 1541), Protestants and Catholics reached a larger agreement. Paul III's special envoy, Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, a high-minded and kindly man, was obliged to accept a compromise with the Protestants. The emperor, harassed by fear of the French and by Ferdinand's need for help against a new Turkish attack, so favored an accord between Protestants and Catholics that many Catholic leaders accused him of Protestant leanings. The Catholic and Protestant leaders finally agreed on clerical marriage and on Communion in both kinds, but they could find no solution acceptable to both sides on papal authority and Christ's real presence in the bread and wine; Contarini was disturbed when the Protestants asked whether a mouse that gnaws a consecrated host eats bread or God. So the conference ended without result, but Charles, who wished to prepare for war as quickly as possible, assured the Protestants that he would not molest them for following the Augsburg Confession or keeping seized church property.
The Evangelical Church
In the same years that the Protestant movement was debating and spreading its influence, it created a church that, on Luther's proposal, was called the Evangelical Church. At first Luther wanted a democratic church system in which each church could choose its own pastor and arrange its own rites and beliefs, but his growing reliance on princes forced him to give these powers to a body chosen by and answerable to the state. In 1525 John, elector of Saxony, ordered all churches of his duchy to be run by church assemblies on the evangelical pattern devised by Melanchthon with Luther's approval. Pastors who disobeyed were first deprived of their income and then banished from the state.
Other Lutheran princes did similar things in their territories. To instruct the evangelical churches Luther wrote a Small Catechism of five pages (1529) containing the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed and a short commentary on each article, in question and answer form, so composed that the Church of the first four Christian centuries would doubtless have accepted it as Christian.
The pastors of the evangelical churches were all pure, kindly men, well versed in Scripture and devoted to their duties. Sunday was treated as the Sabbath, because Luther here put tradition in place of Scripture. The "service of the Lord" contained many rites of the Catholic Church: churches had altars and were adorned with candles and crosses, pastors wore the Catholic clergy's vestments, and part of the Catholic Mass was celebrated in German. Yet preaching came before ritual, and no prayer to the Virgin or saints was read. Images and statues disappeared from the churches, and church architecture changed so that the preacher's words might be better heard; assembly and lecture halls were built in churches. Congregational singing, in which everyone present took part, became customary. Luther became a poet overnight and wrote stirring, inspiring hymns that show his manly character. Protestants sang these and other hymns not only in church worship but gathered during the week to practice them, and many families hummed religious songs in their homes. An anxious Jesuit wrote, "Luther's hymns have destroyed more souls [brought them to the new faith] than his sermons." From then on Protestant music rivaled the Catholic painting of the Renaissance.