The Emperor Prepares for War
Luther died a year before the catastrophe that endangered the very existence of Protestantism in Germany. In 1545 Charles V, helped by Lutheran soldiers, forced Francis I to sign the Peace of Crépy. Suleiman the Magnificent, then at war with Persia, made a five-year truce with the West. Pope Paul III had promised Charles that if he would use all his strength to crush the enemies of the Catholic Church, the pope would give him 1,100,000 ducats, 12,000 soldiers and 500 horse (the book's figures; the last word is garbled and is reconstructed from context). The promise led the emperor to think he might realize his old dream: by crushing the Protestants and uniting the empire in one religion, which he believed would strengthen and ease his rule.
With Protestant princes in Germany defying his orders and setting conditions for their obedience, how could Charles regard himself as master of Germany? He had never taken the existence of Protestantism seriously, nor Luther's quarrels with Catholic theologians. But Protestantism, which had won the hearts of the German princes, had formed a military alliance against the emperor and created a force that could play a decisive part in choosing the next emperor. Protestant writers mocked the emperor in their tracts, Protestant painters drew caricatures of him, and Protestant preachers called him a "child of the devil." Charles could bear this only while he could do nothing about it. Now, with a brief opportunity in his hands, he resolved to crush the Protestants and strengthen his rule over the whole empire.
In May 1546 he mobilized Spanish, Italian and German troops and Bohemian mercenaries, and took with him his ablest general, the Duke of Alva. When the Protestant princes sent envoys to Regensburg to ask what his campaign was for, Charles answered that he had resolved to bring German lands back under his rule. During these talks the emperor won over Maurice, the young, ambitious duke of Albertine Saxony and the ablest military commander in Germany. The Fuggers promised money. The pope, by a bull, excommunicated the emperor's opponents and granted free pardon to those who helped him in this holy war. Charles outlawed John of Ernestine Saxony and Philip of Hesse, warned their subjects to disobey them, and swore not to rest until he had confiscated their lands and property. To divide the Germans he declared that he would not molest Protestants in places where Protestantism had taken firm root. His brother Ferdinand made a similar promise to Bohemia, and Maurice, hoping to take John's place as elector of Saxony, joined Ferdinand. The electors of Cologne and Brandenburg, the Count Palatine and Protestant Nuremberg stayed neutral out of fear or hope. But John of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, the princes of Anhalt and the cities of Augsburg, Strasbourg and Ulm, knowing that not only their faith but their lives and property were at risk, marched against Charles with an army of 57,000 men.
Mühlberg
When John and Philip led their armies south against Charles, Ferdinand swept north and west to seize John's duchy, and Maurice, not to be left out of Ferdinand's conquests, joined him and attacked Ernestine Saxony. John, alarmed at the state of affairs behind his lines, hurried home and skillfully drove the invaders out. His ally Philip's soldiers dispersed for lack of pay, and the Protestant cities, deceived by the emperor's promises, made terms with him. Charles broke the backbone of the cities' freedom by heavy fines. He was now master of his rivals militarily and politically, and the only power supporting the Protestants was the pope: Charles's swift victories had alarmed him. He feared that after destroying the German princes, who kept the emperor from overbearing arrogance, Charles would secure his rule in northern and southern Italy, strip the Papal States in central Italy from the pope, and at last bring the pope himself under his yoke. So in January 1547 the pope suddenly recalled to Italy the troops fighting for the emperor, and expressed pleasure at John's success in Saxony.
Charles nonetheless was determined to fight on until final victory in Germany. Advancing north, he crushed John's tired, weakened soldiers at Mühlberg (April 24, 1547) and took John prisoner. Ferdinand proposed that the emperor execute this brave prince, but the shrewd Charles commuted his sentence to life imprisonment on condition that Wittenberg open its gates to imperial troops. Wittenberg accepted, and so the capital of German Protestantism, where Luther lay at rest in the great church, was occupied by Catholic soldiers. Maurice, now duke, and Joachim, elector of Brandenburg, promised Philip of Hesse that if he surrendered to the emperor they would obtain his release from Charles. But Charles himself had made no such promise, and his generosity went no further than sentencing Philip to fifteen years in prison. It seemed that no one could any longer resist the emperor. Henry VIII had died on January 28 and Francis I on March 31 of that year. After Charlemagne no emperor in western Europe had held such power.
The Reversal
But the tide turned again in favor of the Protestants. The German rulers assembled at Augsburg (September 1547) resolved to resist Charles, who wished to use his military conquests to impose his own legal absolutism on Germany. Meanwhile Pope Paul III accused the emperor of negligence in the killing of Pier Luigi Farnese, the pope's illegitimate son, and Bavaria, always loyal to the Catholic Church, opposed Charles. At the Diet of Augsburg, where Protestants held the majority, the emperor gave provisional consent to clerical marriage, Communion in both kinds, and Protestant retention of church property (1548). The pope protested Charles's interference in church affairs, and Catholics accused the emperor of caring more for extending his influence and encircling the Habsburgs than for restoring the one true religion to the empire.
Maurice, now elector of Saxony and ruling Wittenberg, though himself a convert to Protestantism, felt that the defeated Protestant inhabitants had not forgotten their hatred of him. His betrayal had badly shaken the foundations of his rule. Regretting his past treachery, he secretly joined the Treaty of Chambord, which the German princes made against Charles in January 1552; by it Henry II of France promised to cooperate with the German princes in driving Charles out of Germany. After Henry marched into Lorraine and took Metz, Toul and Verdun, Maurice and his Protestant allies with 30,000 men invaded southern Germany. Charles had dispersed his troops and, drunk with victory, was resting at Innsbruck with no defense but politics. But in politics Maurice was his match. Ferdinand offered Maurice a truce, and Maurice skillfully dragged out the negotiations while his advance on Innsbruck continued. On the night of May 9, with a few attendants, in snow and rain, Charles fled over the Brenner Pass to Villach in Carinthia, and the fortunes of time turned the ruler of Europe into a gouty, shivering fugitive in the Alps.
On May 26 Maurice and the other Protestants met Ferdinand and a group of Catholic leaders at Passau. After long delay Charles advised Ferdinand to make peace with the Protestants (August 2, 1552). By the treaty Philip was freed from prison, the Protestant armies were disbanded, and Protestants and Catholics were to have religious freedom until a new council of the Church, and, if the council failed to settle their differences, religious freedom was to continue forever. Maurice, who had begun his political life with treachery and ended it with brilliant conquests, was killed soon afterward, at thirty (the book's figure), fighting Albert Alcibiades, who had thrown half of Germany into dangerous disorder. Charles, despairing of his aims in Germany, went back west to resume the war with France.
The Peace of Augsburg
Ferdinand, with patience, presided over the historic Diet of Augsburg (February 5 to September 25, 1555), which gave Germany half a century of peace. He had realized that the independence of the German duchies was too strong for the country to be ruled as a single centralized state like France. Though Catholic delegates held a majority, the Protestant minority, relying on its military superiority, insisted that every article of the Augsburg Confession of 1530 be accepted. Elector Augustus, who had succeeded Maurice, also backed the Protestant views, and Catholics had no choice but to accept Protestant demands or resume war. By this time Charles, utterly spent in politics, proposed to the electors that his son Philip be chosen emperor. But even Catholics feared the rule of that stubborn Spaniard, and Ferdinand, who hoped to succeed as emperor, needed Protestant votes in the electoral college.
Protestants were so encouraged by their military advantage that they wanted all their demands met: religious freedom throughout Germany, a ban on Catholic assemblies in Protestant territory, and recognition of all past and future seizures of church property by Protestants. To reconcile Protestants and Catholics, Ferdinand and Augustus found a formula of four words, Cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion"), which itself reveals the spiritual weakness of the German nation and age. To keep peace in each state, its prince could choose between Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism, and his subjects had either to accept the religion of the ruler "in whose land they lived" or leave. Neither side made any pretense of tolerating the other. Protestant leaders, like Catholics, ignored the principle of individual judgment that the Reformation had brought at its outset. That principle had so multiplied sects and created such clashes among them that the German princes had to recognize again the right to oversee religious belief, even if it meant splitting Protestantism into as many parts as there were German states. Protestants now agreed with Charles and the popes that religious unity is essential to social order, and we cannot judge this without considering the sectarian rivalry and enmity that had endangered Germany's existence.
The result had good and bad effects. Religious freedom was narrower than before the Reformation began, except that rulers now banished their heretics and dissenters instead of burning them. The tradition of burning was confined to witches, and the sects' belief in the truth and infallibility of their own faith led to their weakness and incapacity.
The Victory of the Princes
The real victory was not freedom of worship but the freedom of princes. German rulers, like Henry VIII of England, gained control of the Church in their lands and kept for themselves the right to appoint the clergy and officials who supervised the beliefs imposed on the people. So the hope of the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus, that the Church should obey the state, was realized. Because princes, not theologians, had carried the Protestant revolution to victory, they naturally enjoyed its fruits, namely rule free of the emperor and full control of the Church in their domains. German nationalism turned into provincial patriotism, and the religious revolution damaged German unity. At that time, of course, such unity would not necessarily have had good results. Ferdinand's power, after he was elected emperor (1558), was less than Charles's, and the funeral of the Holy Roman Empire was in fact held not in 1806 but in 1555.
The princes' victory weakened the autonomy of cities as it did the empire's. In the days of imperial power, city communities were under the emperor's guardianship, and he protected their freedom against local rulers. With the empire's decay, the barriers that kept local rulers from interfering in city affairs disappeared, and the cities lost their independence. At the same time the growing power of Holland cut Germany off from foreign trade, which had been carried by German goods shipped down the Rhine to the North Sea. The economy of the southern German cities also fell into crisis as the commerce of Venice and the Mediterranean declined. Commercial stagnation and political confusion brought German culture into decline, and for two centuries German cities could not regain the economic and intellectual importance that had produced and strengthened the Reformation.
Melanchthon's Last Years
Melanchthon, who lived five years after the Peace of Augsburg, was unwilling to compromise. He had lost his leadership role not only in negotiations with Catholic authorities but also in setting Protestantism's course. He freed himself from his leader's ideas to the point of rejecting the doctrines of predestination and of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist; and while, like Luther, he held that good works are not enough for salvation, he labored much to urge people to do good. His departures from some of Luther's views provoked a sharp quarrel between the Philippists (Melanchthon and his followers) and the strict Lutherans. The latter called Melanchthon an "apostate, godless slave" and a "servant of the devil," and he in turn called them empty sophists and idolaters.
As religious quarrels spread or abated, university professors were appointed or dismissed, jailed or freed. In the end the two camps agreed that the state has the right to suppress heretics by force. Melanchthon thought like Luther on the legitimacy of slavery and the divine authority of kings. But he believed the Lutheran movement should rely, as in Zurich, Strasbourg, Nuremberg and Geneva, on the support of influential city patricians rather than on alliance with princes. In these critical moments he thought like Erasmus and said: let us speak only of man's weakness and the Creator's mercy, of church organization and the true worship of God. Is Christianity anything other than comforting people and teaching them the truth? Apart from these, the rest is scholastic debate and sectarian quarrel. When death approached, Melanchthon welcomed it with open arms as an escape from "the rage and clamor of theologians" and "the barbarism of this sophistical age." History had mistakenly made a revolutionary leader out of a learned, peace-loving, conciliatory spirit.