The Historical Atlas of the British Isles by Ian Barnes

Author:Ian Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783408061
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Protestant Reformation occurred in a time of political and religious flux in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A transformation was generated by: an increased religious awareness and the spread of the devotio moderna, a more individual attitude towards belief and religion, especially strong in the Low Countries; and the Renaissance, which enhanced the interests of princely power and also increased intellectual curiosity, spread by the humanism of key figures such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas Moore in England. The intellectual ferment was located in the fast changing economic and social networks produced by an emergent capitalist system, new banking methods and increased urbanization. The corrupt Catholic Church came under close inspection in terms of ideas and organization.

Humanism required an improvement in scholarship with a rejection of non-biblical superstition and an individual and personal commitment to the concept of personal salvation, which eschewed the need for an intermediary priest to intercede between mankind and God. Simultaneously, free thinkers argued for an end to church taxation and tithes, demanding improved standards of religious practice and obligation. Anti-clericalism reached a high point when Martin Luther, outraged over the sale of papal indulgences, nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg in October 1517. His demands and those of the Swiss Zwingli and Frenchman, John Calvin, supported the emergence of centralized and absolutist states in confrontation with more radical Dissenters, such as the Anabaptists and Millenarian movements.

Germany was an especial home to virulent anti-clericalism and hostility to church abuse and corruption. Many princes, imperial knights and city councils seized upon the new ideas to legitimize curtailing the powers of the Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, as well as the papacy. The Dissenters appropriated Church property, and Protestant churches became subordinate to temporal rulers, such as England’s Henry VIII who developed the early Anglican Church.

Protestantism never managed to unite its various elements despite the attempts made by Philip of Hesse who sought to mend fences between Lutherans and Zwinglians, to no avail, since they continued to differ upon conflicting interpretations of the Mass. A most important Protestant was Calvin, whose ideas on developing the Reformed Faith, spread from the city state of Geneva to France, the Netherlands, the German states and parts of eastern Europe, notably Poland, and Transylvania under Calvinist princes owing fealty to the Ottoman Sultan.

In 1531, German Protestant leaders formed the Schmalkaldic League against Emperor Charles V to defend their faith, fighting against the Emperor in 1546–47 and losing at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547. However, Charles was so beset by other foreign policy issues that he could not prevent the spread of Protestantism and its firm establishment. Wars with Valois France, the Dutch, the Turks and a difficult Spain kept him too occupied. Tired of some 30 years of war, in the Treaty of Augsburg in September 1555, the Emperor agreed that each subject of the Holy Roman Emperor should follow their prince’s faith. Consequently, some 40 per cent of Europeans accepted a form of reformed religion.

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