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East Germany The Reformation and the Thirty Years' War
On the eve of All Saints' Day in 1517, Martin Luther,
professor of theology at Wittenberg University in Saxony, posted
on the castle church door ninety-five theses that primarily
concerned the sale of indulgences--papal grants of mitigation of
penalties, including release from purgatory. Luther challenged
the secular orientation of the Roman Catholic Church and, more
fundamentally, the authority of pope and church in matters of
faith, affirming instead the authority of Holy Scripture and
salvation by faith alone. Because of the invention of movable
type, Luther's theses, posted to stimulate debate among academics
and clergy, spread rapidly throughout Germany. In 1520, in the
midst of the crisis he had created, Luther published three
pamphlets calling for religious reformation and for the
establishment of a German national church, independent of Rome.
In 1521 both Rome and the empire banned Luther, who found
sanctuary among the German princes.
The oppressed German peasantry read into Luther's pamphlet
"On the Freedom of a Christian Man" a promise of social reform
and, stimulated by the successful struggle of Swiss peasants
against the Habsburgs, revolted against the princes in the Great
Peasant War of 1525. The war originated in the area of Lake
Constance near the Swiss border and spread to central Germany,
receiving support from dissatisfied city dwellers and rebellious
knights. Luther, a social and political conservative who relied
on the nobility for support in his religious revolution, allied
himself with the princes in their bloody suppression of the
peasant revolt.
The Habsburg emperor Charles V (1519-56), who had inherited
Spain, the Netherlands, southern Italy, Sicily, and the Austrian
lands as patrimony, determined to restore the unity of the German
empire, which was divided between Catholics and Protestants and
threatened by foreign powers. In 1521 he became engaged in a
struggle with Francis I of France, who had resolved to destroy
the power of the Habsburgs. During a campaign against Francis I,
German mercenary soldiers, most of them Lutheran, sacked Rome in
1527. The capture of Rome restored imperial control of the Middle
Kingdom, which had been lost during the Great Interregnum. A
staunch Catholic and a firm believer in the tradition of the Holy
Roman Empire, Charles assumed responsibility for protecting the
Roman Catholic Church in the Lutheran revolt. However, many
German princes, hoping to subordinate a German national church to
the authority of the sovereign states and thus further
consolidate their power, supported Luther's doctrines. They led a
reform movement and in 1530 created the Protestant League of
Schmalkalden to oppose the emperor. By 1545 all northeastern and
northwestern Germany and large parts of southern Germany were
Protestant. In 1546 Charles, in an attempt to suppress the
growing heresy, declared war on the Protestant princes. The war
continued for a number of years until a compromise settlement was
reached in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. In the settlement,
which represented a victory for the princes, Lutheranism and
Catholicism were granted formal recognition in Germany, and each
prince gained the right to decide the religion to be practiced
within his state.
Religious warfare resumed in the early seventeenth century
with the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), a European-wide struggle
that devastated Germany and reduced the size and power of the
empire
(see
fig. 3). The Thirty Years' War resulted from a local
rebellion. In 1618 the Habsburg-ruled Bohemian kingdom, opposed
to Emperor Matthias's designation of his cousin Ferdinand as
future king of Bohemia, elected Frederick of the Palatinate, a
German Calvinist, to the throne. In 1620, in an attempt to wrest
back control, imperial armies and the Catholic League under
General Johann von Tilly defeated the Bohemians at the Battle of
the White Mountain near Prague. Neighboring Protestant countries,
alarmed by the resulting superior strength of the Catholic League
and the possibility of Catholic supremacy in Europe, and France,
opposed to the increasing power of the Habsburgs, supported the
Protestant German princes, who seized the opportunity to renew
their struggle against the emperor. However, by 1627 the imperial
armies of Ferdinand II (1619-37) and the Catholic League, under
the supreme command of General Albrecht von Wallenstein, had
defeated the Protestants and secured a foothold in northern
Germany. Invading armies from Sweden, which, secretly supported
by Catholic France, had come to the defense of the Protestant
cause, were defeated in 1635, and the Peace of Prague was signed.
In that same year, however, France had openly joined Sweden and
declared war on Spain, a traditional ally of Habsburg Austria.
The war continued to rage, for the most part on German soil,
until the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648. The settlement,
which signaled the re-emergence of France as the main power on
the continent, gave German territories to France and Sweden and
extended toleration to Calvinism.
Data as of July 1987
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