to say, gave a new force to this kind of textual challenge. Christian humanism, especially in the person of Erasmus, may have remained committed to internal reform of the Church and deeply suspicious of the Lutheran ‘reformation’; but it also encouraged, if not necessarily outright anti-clericalism, at least the subjection of Church rituals and orthodoxies to critical scrutiny and the moral judgment of the individual. All these challenges to clerical authority, both Christian humanist and ‘Protestant’, would at the same time, directly or by implication, affect attitudes towards the powers of secular rulers.
Ideas such as these – not only criticism of the Church and its abuses but also, and not least, the elevation of secular authority – would be central to the Reformation. Yet even if we acknowledge that the institutions of the Church were in the end resistant to the necessary changes, and even if we treat Luther’s ideas as a profoundly revolutionary transformation in theology, the magnitude of the Lutheran rupture seems incommensurate with the novelty of his theology. There is also a massive disparity – which, of course, there often is with major thinkers but which, in Luther’s case, is particularly striking – between the meaning or intentions of his doctrine and the direction of the changes that emerged in its wake. It will be argued in what follows that the scale and consequences of the break had less to do with the originality and revolutionary import or intent of Luther’s ideas than with the geopolitical and social conflicts into which they were drawn.
That Luther challenged some of the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism with drastic effect is beyond question, as is, needless to say, the separation of ‘Protestants’ – in all their various and often antithetical guises – from the Catholic Church. We shall look at the nature and implications of Luther’s challenge to medieval Catholicism, but Luther’s doctrine was something else too. Inextricably connected with his attacks on the Church, not only its corruptions but its very claims to jurisdiction, are his views on secular government. For all Luther’s occasionally stinging attacks on German princes, there hardly exists in the Western canon a more uncompromising case for strict obedience to secular authority; and this, as we shall see, belongs to the essence of Lutheran doctrine no less than does the attack on the medieval Church’s practice of indulgences or Luther’s idea of justification by faith.
Yet, while this fundamental aspect of Protestant doctrine was certainly not lost on German princes or on European kings, it was also somehow transformed into its opposite, a doctrine of rebellion. The question, then, must be how such a rigid doctrine of obedience could have such revolutionary effects and, beyond that, how a doctrine that seems far better suited to defending than to challenging the supremacy of princely power could be transformed into a doctrine of resistance. The answer lies in specificities of context, which both impelled Luther to formulate his doctrine of obedience and also permitted it to be transformed into its opposite.
Martin Luther
If the sixteenth century was a period of rising territorial states in Western Europe, Germany, like Italy, represented an exception. While in other cases the crisis of feudalism had meant a growing challenge to parcellized sovereignty from centralizing monarchies, in Germany it gave new life to the fragmentation of governance. Feudal lordship may have given way to princely government, and the feudal powers of the lesser nobility may have been weakened; but German principalities and duchies vigorously resisted the kind of monarchical centralization that was taking place elsewhere in Western Europe and produced in its stead a new kind of parcellized sovereignty.
In the Holy Roman Empire, which was the nearest thing to a national state in German territories, the emperor’s authority was severely and explicitly limited by the autonomous powers of local duchies, principalities and cities. In the thirteenth century, Frederick II – partly in a fruitless effort to maintain the presence of the Empire in northern Italy – had ceded even more powers to local German lords, including princes of the Church. Although German landed classes in the west were never able to consolidate their powers over peasants in a ‘second serfdom’ as their eastern counterparts would do, the Empire had effectively transformed them from feudal lords into local rulers, territorial princes with state-like powers of their own, not least the power to tax. This gave them access to increasing revenues from peasants, especially from more prosperous peasant farmers who, even while freed from feudal dependence, bore the greatest burden of taxation. This would become a major source of grievance in the peasant war of 1524–5.
Secular authority had been further fragmented, especially from the twelfth century, with the foundation of cities by both emperors and dukes, for administrative or commercial purposes. These cities would challenge the powers of both emperor and local princes. Like the Italian city-states, German cities often governed their surrounding villages, exacting taxes from the peasantry by means of a collective urban lordship; but they stood in a different relation to landed aristocracies and princes than did the Italians. In northern Italy, the major city-states could trace their urban lineage back to imperial Rome, and the landed aristocracy was, in general, weaker than it was elsewhere in feudal Europe. The German cities, by contrast, owed their late foundations to superior lords. Even as they built upon the independence granted by higher authorities, they were obliged to defend their autonomous powers, inseparably political and economic, against other claimants within the imperial hierarchy, from emperors to princes.
Here, as in Renaissance Italy, political struggles were difficult to disentangle from economic rivalries and conflicts. Just as German princes relied on their political and military dominance for access to the revenues derived from cities and especially from peasant labour, so too was the success of the commercial cities dependent on their ‘extra-economic’ powers and privileges. The commercial dominance of the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe, for instance, relied on the League’s coercive powers, the capacity to enforce monopolies, embargoes and blockades, which might require military interventions up to and including outright war. The League’s dominance was threatened not so much by the purely ‘economic’ superiority of its commercial rivals – the kind of competitive advantage enjoyed by cost-effective capitalist producers – as by their more effective geopolitical reach and military power.
In 1519, the Habsburg King Charles I of Spain became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His reign would be marked by intense and varied conflicts with German princes and municipal authorities, to say nothing of the peasant revolt. Charles was constantly distracted by the Empire’s rivalries with other rising states, as well as Spain’s project of imperial expansion, revolt on Spanish soil and the ever-present Turkish threat. He never succeeded in subduing local powers in the German territories. His reign would play a decisive role in the life of Martin Luther and in the Reformation, which flourished in the context of the Holy Roman Empire, not only because the emperor’s attacks on Luther helped to concentrate the theologian’s mind but because Lutheran doctrine proved so useful to various protagonists in the rivalries among competing powers.
Born in 1483 into a reasonably comfortable family, Luther was intended for the law; but he soon gave up his legal education for the Church and became an Augustinian monk. The monastic life seems to have generated little but doubt and despair. The Christianity he had learned from preachers and a very pious mother was obsessed with sin, repentance and the wrath of God. It did, to be sure, suggest that repentant sinners can make some contribution to their own salvation; and theology appeared to teach that, even if salvation is a matter of God’s grace and not just a simple reward for a virtuous life, believers can and must engage in a constant struggle to cooperate with God – always, of course, with the help of the Church. But, to Luther, this appeared to mean that, torn between virtue and sin, between God and the devil, we can in this life never know whether all our efforts are enough to please God. Not even the extreme asceticism he adopted in the monastery could offer any certainty or comfort. As he described his own experience, it only turned his soul upon itself. He began to break free from this tormented struggle when his superior, Johann Staupitz, convinced him that repentance is not a matter of seeking God’s love, which is already evident in the sacrifice of Christ, but, on the contrary, begins with our own love of God.
Luther was also persuaded by Staupitz, who was
