The Empire : “He who rules, his religion”
Things began to unravel inside the Holy Roman Empire. At the time, it held together some 400 territories, varying hugely in size as well as in political regime[1]. There, Luther's thought spread like wild fire and met with growing support beyond the German-speaking states. Within two years works by Luther are estimated to have been disseminated in more than half a million copies. Why did the Roman authority fail to clamp down on and silence the Wittenberg monk at that point in time? For essentially political reasons: at the time, the political and religious authorities were focussed on an issue that seemed vastly more important. In 1519, two years after Martin Luther's first public utterance, the throne of the Empire was vacant. The whole of European diplomacy, and Papal diplomacy with it, was absorbed by this issue and underestimated the part the Wittenberg monk, the Reformer could play up until the election of Charles V[2], who would become the great champion of the Catholic faith throughout Europe. But the papacy had wasted two years during which Luther's ideas had spread everywhere.
Two more years went by before the Emperor, detained by revolts in his Spanish domains, returned to Germany to put an end to the « Lutheran plague »
which, as he saw it, raged on an epidemic scale in the states of the Empire. The Reformation was a grass-root movement that spread through the populations but was very soon taken in hand by many territorial princes ruling over large or tiny sovereign states. These German princes who took a public stand in favour of Luther's doctrines, thereby deserting the Roman church, did so partly out of conviction, partly motivated by the possibility of secularising church property[3] which amounted to about one third of the whole Germanic realm. What with Bremen in 1525, Saxony and Hesse in 1527, Hamburg in 1529 then Pomerania, Braunschweig, Brandenburg etc. it is estimated that by 1530 two third of Germany had been won over to the Reformation. Gathered at Speyer in 1529 as members of the Imperial Diet[4] the princes would not acknowledge the authority of the Emperor, nor the law of the majority and protested their right to adopt the “true” faith.
What were the options towards a resolution of this unprecedented situation? Contemporaries could think of two: working towards reconciliation or a show of strength. Major efforts were undertaken towards reconciliation. Famed colloquia where the brightest theologians of both camps vied with each other were held in 1540 and 1541 in Worms and Regensburg to no avail: Luther's disciples (Mélanchthon, Bucer[5]) had verbal jousts with cardinals, usually followers of Erasmus[6] but the gap was too wide and no compromise proved feasible. That left the resort to arms. Charles V tried it but after a few initial victories, he suffered severe reversals. The military extirpation of the Reformation was proving to be impossible or disastrous. Yet the Emperor could not bring himself to negotiate with the Protestants as« it could offend, wound, injure, weaken or oppress our true old Christian and Catholic religion »
. So he entrusted Germany to his brother Ferdinand[7] and, abdicating in 1556, he withdrew from the world in a Spanish monastery.
More pragmatic, more level-headed, Ferdinand negotiated. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg laid down a principle which gained ground in no time: cujus regio, ejus religio[8]. It meant that each prince of the Germanic realm had the right to opt for the faith of his choice, the which became compulsory for all his subjects. If they did not wish to adopt the prince's religion, they could migrate to a state where the faith of their choice was practised. They had two options only: Roman Catholicism of Lutheranism. The followers of Calvin or Zwingli[9] were, along with the Anabaptists[10], excluded from the deal. This Peace of Augsburg was a major watershed in European history: the Holy Roman Empire was with this text first in institutionalising the breach in Christian unity. For the first time constitutional law acknowledged the fact that two different ecclesial and confessional systems could exist side by side in one singular realm. Luther's predication, which invited all the faithful to read and form their own opinion of the Bible without troubling with the Roman hierarchy's mediation paradoxically lead to restricting this freedom of choice to the sovereign princes of the Empire alone, namely a mere 0.0025% of its population. For the rest, their embryonic freedom consisted in the option to migrate with all their possessions.
This agreement had not been desired by the participants, it just turned out to be the only possible way forward. It owed its novel character to its political nature: not the theologians with a religious consensus but the princes with the support of their lawyers devised a political compromise that would allow for the cohabitation of different religions. A note from the Imperial Tribunal states in no uncertain terms that religious peace is not a spiritual matter but rather a political and secular one. In Germany, the crisis found in the 1555 Peace of Augsburg a political and diplomatic resolution, an arrangement between the princes who would henceforward have the upper hand on religion. It was followed by a fifty year period of peace during which each state developed an irreversible faith-driven political and social culture. This had been made possible by the peculiar structure of an Empire splintered in numerous principalities, but it did not appear to have applications for any other region in Europe.
