REFORMATION

 

The year 1500 AD was a round year to remember and that was the year in which Charles V was born. By then the feudal disorder of the Middle Ages was left behind and Europe was split into highly centralised kingdoms.

The most powerful of all kings during the coming time was Charles V, then a baby in the cradle. He was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and Maximilian I, the Emperor of the Holy Roman or the Western Roman Empire. 

Charles V has fallen heir to the greater part of the European map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins and aunts in Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Italy and Spain together with all their colonies in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Charles V was born at Ghent in Belgium and was raised as a Fleming.  

As his father was dead and his mother became unbalanced in mind, he was raised by his Aunt Margaret. Charles grew up to be a Catholic but he was against religious intolerance. He was lazy but he was condemned to rule a large part of the world when Europe was in a state of religious fervour. 

Charles aped between various states of Europe and despite being a peace loving man was forced to be at war always. At the age of 55 he turned his back on the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and stupidity. 3 years later in 1558 he died, a very disappointed man.  

At that time, the church was the 2^nd great power and landowner in Europe and has changed greatly. The church has grown too rich and the Pope lived in a palace and surrounded himself with artists, musicians and literary men. He divided his time unevenly between state and art with a leaning towards the latter. The affairs of the state take only 10% of his time.   

The Archbishops and Cardinals follow the example of the Pope. The Bishops imitate the Archbishops and only the village priests have remained faithful to their duties.

The common people are much better off than earlier. They are more prosperous, lived in better houses, their children went to better schools, their cities were more beautiful than before, and their firearms have made them equal to their enemies.  

The people of Northern Europe, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedes, and the English and so on had an entirely different climate than Southern Europe and kept indoors most of the time while the Italians lived under the open sky and it was easier for them to laugh and sing. The Northerners were very conscious of religion.          

In contrast, the papacy and the College of Cardinals were almost entirely composed of Italians and they had turned the church into a pleasant club where people discussed art, music and literature but rarely about religion. 

Therefore the split between the serious North and more civilised but easy going South, was growing wider all the time and no one was aware of the danger that was threatening the church.

The rift between the South and North made reformation take place first in Germany. The endless quarrels between Pope and the Emperor have caused much mutual bitterness. 

In the other European countries where there was a strong king, the ruler had been able to protect his people from the priests. In Germany where a shadowy emperor ruled a crowd of turbulent princelings, the people were left at the mercy of the Church. 

The church henchmen were trying to collect large sums of the money from the people for the benefit of the enormous churches that were built. The Germans felt they were being milked and did not like it at all. Most important, Germany was where the Printing press was invented and that made books cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manuscript which only the priests interpreted.

When they read the Holy Scriptures, the people realized that the priests were telling them many things which were not there in them. People started asking questions for which there are no answers and doubt entered into the peoples mind.

The attack began when the humanist of the North opened fire (not in the real sense of the term) on the monks. They of course still had too much respect to direct their attack on the Pope, but the corrupt monks were a good target to open the attack. 

Surprisingly, the leader in this attack was a very faithful son of the Church named Desiderius Erasmus (actual name Gerard Gerardzoon). He is from Rotterdam and become a priest in a monastery and lived there for some time. He resented what happened in the church at those times and later as a public pamphleteer mounted an attack on the church. He published a series of letters named the “Letters of Obscure Men”. In these letters the stupidity and arrogance of the then monks and that was exposed in a mixture of German-Latin. Erasmus gave the world the first reliable version of the New Testament.

In the year 1500 Erasmus wrote a short work called “Praise of Folly” in which he attacked the monks and their followers with humour. The booklet was a huge seller in the sixteenth century and was translated into all the European languages. The book and other works by Erasmus made people attentive to the workings of the church. Erasmus appealed to the people to help him to bring about a reform in the Christian faith.   

But nothing came about of his plans as he was gentle and too tolerant to please the enemies of the Church who wanted a radical reform. They found their man in Martin Luther. 

He came from a North German peasant family and had a brilliant brain. He did his Master of Arts from a University and then joined in a Dominican Monastery. He then became a college professor at the theological school of Wittenburg and began to explain the scriptures. In his studies of the Old and New Testament he found that there are great differences which existed between the words of Christ and those that were preached in the churches.

The gigantic church of Saint Peter which Pope Julius has thrust upon his successors, although only half complete, was already in need of repair. Pope Alexander VI has spent every penny of the papal treasury on it and Pope Leo X who came in 1513 was on the verge of bankruptcy. 

The Pope then went back to the old method of raising cash. He started selling indulgences which are a piece of parchment when purchased for a certain some, of money promised a sinner to reduce the time he would have to spend in purgatory.

The sale of indulgences in Saxony was overdone forcefully and this led to great resentment among the people. Martin Luther who was honest was very angry with the way things are happening from the side of the Church and on the 31st of October 1517, he went to the Church and pasted on its door a sheet of paper which contained 95 statements attacking the sale of indulgences. In less than 2 months all of Europe was discussing those 95 statements.  

The papal authorities were alarmed and summoned Luther to proceed to Rome to explain what he did. Luther did not like the idea and remembered John Huss, the Czech about 100 years before him who tried to criticise the indulgences and the other aspects of the Roman Catholic faith. He was summoned to Rome and was ultimately burnt at stake when he refused to recant what he said. Martin Luther  burnt the papal bull summoning him to Rome in front of admiring people and after that peace between him and the Pope became impossible.

Without any design on his part to be so, Luther had become a leader of a large multitude of Christians. German patriots rushed to his defence. The students of Wittenberg, Erfurt and Leipzig offered to defend him should the Church try to imprison him. The Elector of Saxony proclaimed that no harm would befall Luther as long as he remained in Saxony.

This happened in the year 1520 when entire Europe along with all the colonies of the European nations in Asia, Africa and the Americas was being ruled by Charles V. He was just 20 years old then and was forced to remain in the good books of the Pope.  

Charles V now summoned Luther to the Diet (a general assembly) of Worms (a city) on the Rhine to explain his stand. By now Martin Luther has become the national hero of Germans and he went. He refused to take back one word of whatever he said and went on to say that his conscience was controlled only by the word of God and he would live and die for his conscience.   

The Diet of Worms after deliberation declared Luther an outlaw and ordered all Germans not to give him any food or shelter or even read a single word from his books. But a great majority of the Germans rejected the edict. 

For safety Luther was hidden in a castle belonging to the Elector of Saxony. There he defied all papal authority by translating the entire Bible into German so that people can read the word of God for themselves.

By this time the Reformation ceased to be a religious or spiritual affair. Everyone jumped in and Church territories were attacked and looted and their territory grabbed. The half-starved peasants following their half-crazy agitators attacked the castles of their masters and plundered and murdered with the same zeal as the early Crusaders that did so before. 

There was a huge disorder in the Empire. Some Princes became Protestants (as the protesting adherents of Luther were called) and persecuted their Catholic subjects. Some remained Catholic and hanged their Protestant subjects. Now all Luther did was to try and purify Christianity from the distortions preached by the Church but that movement has deteriorated into intolerance and strife.

In 1526 the Diet of Speyer was called to settle the dispute and it concluded that all subjects of a King should have the same religion. This turned Germany into thousands of principalities and created a situation where normal growth is delayed for hundreds of years.

Luther died in the year 1546 and was buried in the same Church where he posted the famous 95 objections. So in less than 30 years the joking and laughing world of renaissance got transformed into the arguing and quarrelling and debating society of the Reformation. The spiritual empire of the Pose ended and Europe turned into a battlefield where Protestants and Catholics killed each other for the greater glory of a theological doctrine. It is amazing that just one man can be the fulcrum for this complete transition.