and employment. Denied access both to the trade guilds and to the city councils, discontent grew within this new urban proletariat.
The early sixteenth century thus witnessed growing social unrest in many cities, as demands for broader-based and more representative government gained momentum. In many cases, the demands for religious reform became entangled with a growing clamor for social change, so that religious and social change came to be seen as interconnected. Economic, social, and political factors help explain why the Reformation succeeded, for example, in Nuremberg and Strasbourg, yet failed in Erfurt.
A number of theories have been advanced to explain the particular appeal of the Reformation to the populations of the great cities of western Europe. Three theories advanced during the 1970s tried to identify the reason for this appeal to urban populations. The German church historian Berndt Moeller argued that the urban sense of community had been disrupted in the fifteenth century, through growing social tension within the cities and an increasing tendency to rely upon external political bodies, such as the imperial government or the papal curia.1 By adopting the Lutheran Reformation, Moeller suggested, such cities were able to restore a sense of communal identity, including the notion of a common religious community binding inhabitants together in a shared religious life. Significantly, Moeller drew attention to the social implications of Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (see pp. 183–5), which broke down certain traditional distinctions within urban society and encouraged a sense of communal unity.
A second explanation was advanced by the American cultural historian Thomas A. Brady, based largely upon his analysis of the city of Strasbourg.2 Brady argued that the decision to adopt Protestantism at Strasbourg was the outcome of a class struggle, in which a ruling coalition of patricians and merchants believed that their social position could be maintained only through alignment with the Reformation. The urban oligarchs thus introduced the Reformation as a subtle means of preserving their vested interests, which were threatened by a popular protest movement. A similar situation, Brady suggested, existed in many other cities.
A third explanation of the appeal of the Reformation to sixteenth-century urban communities centers on the doctrine of justification by faith (an idea explored in detail in Chapter 7). The American church historian Steven Ozment argued that the popular appeal of Protestantism derived from its doctrine of justification by faith, which offered relief from the psychological pressure of the late medieval penitential system and an associated “semi-Pelagian” doctrine of justification.3 As the weight of this psychological burden was greatest and most evident in urban communities, he argued, it was within such communities that Protestantism found its greatest popular support.
Ozment argued that Moeller had vastly exaggerated the differences between Luther and the theologians of the southwest. The early reformers shared a common message, which could be summarized as the liberation of individual believers from the psychological burdens imposed by late medieval religion. Whatever their differences, the magisterial reformers – such as Bucer, Zwingli, and Luther – shared a common concern to proclaim the doctrine of justification by faith through grace, thereby eliminating the theological necessity of and diminishing the popular concern for indulgences, purgatory, invocation of the saints, and so forth. The pressure for social change is thus, according to Ozment, the outcome, not the cause, of the new religious ideas of the age.
Each of these theories is significant, and together they have provided an important stimulus to the more detailed study of the development of urban Protestantism in the first phase of the Reformation. Equally, each has been shown to have obvious weaknesses, as one might expect from ambitious global theories. For example, in the case of Geneva, as we shall see, the social tensions which eventually resulted in alignment with the Protestant city of Berne and adoption of the Zwinglian Reformation did not arise from class differences, but from division within a common social class over whether to support the Duchy of Savoy or the Swiss Confederacy, represented by the city of Berne. The pro-Savoyard Mammelukes and the pro-Bernese Eiguenots were both drawn from a single social group, characterized by a range of identifiable shared economic, familial, and social interests. Similarly, Ozment’s suggestion of a universal concern for the doctrine of justification finds little support in the case of cities within or linked with the Swiss Confederacy – such as Zurich, St. Gallen, and Geneva – and overlooks the obvious hesitations concerning the doctrine on the part of many Swiss reformers.
Nevertheless, some common features emerge from a study of the origins and development of the Reformation in major northern European cities such as Augsburg, Basle, Berne, Colmar, Constance, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hamburg, Lübeck, Memmingen, Ulm, and Zurich. It is helpful to explore them.
In the first place, the Reformation in the cities appears to have been a response to some form of popular pressure for change. Nuremberg is a rare instance of a city council imposing a reformation without significant preceding popular protest or demand. Dissatisfaction among urban populations of the early sixteenth century was not necessarily purely religious in character; social, economic, and political grievances were unquestionably present, to varying extents, within the agglomerate of unrest evident at the time. City councils generally reacted in response to this popular pressure, often channeling it in directions appropriate to their own needs and purposes. This subtle manipulation of such pressure was an obvious way of co-opting and controlling a potentially dangerous popular protest movement. Existing urban regimes were often relatively unchanged by the introduction of new religious ideas and practices, which suggests that city councils were able to respond to such popular pressure without radical changes in the existing social orders.
Second, the success of the Reformation within a city was dependent upon a number of historical contingencies. To adopt the Reformation was to risk a disastrous change in political alignment, in that existing treaties or relationships – military, political, and commercial – with territories or cities which chose to remain Catholic were usually deemed to be broken as a result. A city’s trading relationships – upon which her economic existence might depend – might thus be compromised fatally. The success of the Reformation in the city of St. Gallen was partly due to the fact that the city’s linen industry was not adversely affected to any significant degree by the decision to adopt the Reformation. Equally, a city (such as Erfurt) in close proximity to a Catholic city (Mainz) and a Lutheran territory (Saxony) could risk becoming embroiled in military conflict with one or other of these interested parties, with potentially lethal results for the independence of that city.
Third, the romantic, idealized vision of a reformer arriving in a city to preach the gospel, with an immediate ensuing decision on the part of the city to adopt the principles of the Reformation, must be abandoned as quite unrealistic. Throughout the entire process of Reformation, from the initial decision to implement a process of reform to subsequent decisions concerning the nature and the pace of reforming proposals, it was the city council who remained in control. Zwingli’s Reformation in Zurich proceeded considerably more slowly than he would have liked on account of the cautious approach adopted by the council at crucial moments. Bucer’s freedom of action in Strasbourg was similarly limited. As Calvin would discover, city councils were perfectly able to evict reformers from their precincts if they stepped out of line with publicly stated council policy or decisions.
In practice, the relationship between city council and reformer was generally symbiotic. The reformer, by presenting a coherent vision of the Christian gospel and its implications for the religious, social, and political structures and practices of a city, was able to prevent a potentially revolutionary situation from degenerating into chaos. The constant threat of reversion to Catholicism, or subversion by radical Anabaptist movements, rendered the need for a reformer inevitable. Someone had to give religious direction to a movement which, unchecked and lacking direction, might degenerate into chaos, with momentous and unacceptable consequences for the existing power structures of the city and the individuals who controlled them.
Equally, the reformer was someone who was under authority, one
