By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Holy Roman Empire, the Reformation, and the birth of the Netherlands

The Holy Roman Empire was created by joining in personal union. With the imperial title the crown of the Kingdom of Italy with the Frankish crown, notably the Kingdom of East Francia. Soon these kingdoms would be joined by the Kingdom of Burgundy and the Kingdom of Bohemia. By the end of the 15th century, the empire was still composed of three major blocks. Later territorially, only the Kingdom of Germany and Bohemia remained, with the Burgundian territories lost to France.

Voltaire observed that the creature that called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But in Voltaire’s time, it was also somewhat unfair. The empire that went by the name of the Holy Roman Empire did not aspire to be the sort of empire Constantine would have recognized, a product of conquest and war, with centrally appointed ministers reporting up a bureaucratic chain of command. 

The empire Voltaire described had initially been created through an agreement between the Frankish king, Charlemagne, and Pope Leo III, in 800. Leo had refused to accept the authority of the empress Irene, who, after deposing her son and taking power for herself three years before, now ruled at Constantinople. After several vicissitudes, the empire as it existed in 1500 had descended from a meeting (called a Diet) of lords, which, in 1356, issued a charter known as the Golden Bull. The point of the Golden Bull was to establish the terms under which a college of seven electors, three of their bishops, would elect a new emperor. 

The terms of the Golden Bull make it clear that imperial authority depended upon the agreement of the essential members of the imperial aristocracy, whose own head was negotiated with leaders in the territories they controlled. It would have been at this point that the spirit of Constantine if it had come visiting, would have given up in disgust. The fact that the emperor was elected, much as it would have appalled Constantine, will be significant for understanding how the Reformation began. 

The Holy Roman Empire’s biggest problem was not lacking holiness or Romanness but rather the absence of a coherent bureaucratic government. As the core of Charlemagne’s empire passed to the kings of France, the German lands to the north remained under the control of emperors who essentially split their time between Germany and Italy, negotiating and renegotiating their power with the papacy as well as their sundry vassals.

In 1440, with the election of the first member of what would become the longest-serving dynastic group, the Habsburgs, to hold the throne as emperor, there began to be serious efforts to make the system work better. Frederick, the second Habsburg emperor, settled the formal relationship between the papacy and the empire through the Concordat of Vienna in 1448. The two parties agreed that the emperor could influence the selection of senior clerics in his territory. At the same time, the pope would retain the right to collect taxes from Church lands and determine matters of theological importance. The corollary of this arrangement was that local princes began to assert greater control over Church hierarchies in their bailiwick. 

The settlement with the Church by no means solved all of Frederick’s problems. In 1457, Frederick, whose central European base was in Austria, tried to stabilize direct control over Hungary and Bohemia, still a stronghold for followers of Jan Hus. His claim was rejected. When he attempted to assert authority by force of arms, he was defeated. He essentially withdrew, leaving power to his son Maximilian, whose election as “king of the Romans” in 1486 marked him out as the heir apparent. 

In late Oct. 2019, titled “For Maximilian, I, the emperor at the heart of “The Last Knight,” armor was as much for propaganda as protection.” Titled in the exhibition “The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

A better diplomat than his father, Maximilian earned considerable goodwill by acting as a buffer between his father and the numerous princes who opposed him. He exploited the goodwill he’d earned by summoning an Imperial Diet at Worms in 1495. Maximilian used this occasion to declare a universal peace and establish a new imperial court to handle disputes between his vassals and a new regional administration system. Additionally, Maximilian introduced more centralized systems of taxation. Ideally, this would supplement or replace the existing system of taxation through which vassals were assessed contributions for imperial defense. The problem with this system was that it meant people had to own up to what they had, while the old system allowed them to state their worth and use it to provide troops’ levies or contributions of cash to the imperial treasury instead of soldiers. 

A more efficient tax system was increasingly crucial because the war was getting a great deal more expensive. The Turks had taken Constantinople, in part, because they had a large artillery train that allowed them to batter the city walls into rubble. Artillery required professionals who could handle the basic math necessary to construct and fire the guns. Also, as Turkish armies ran into traditional feudal armies, the result was routinely catastrophic from a European perspective (it is fair to say that the early Ottoman interests in securing the Middle East spared the empire an invasion it might not have been able to resist). War had to professionalize, and it did so through the development of increasingly influential bands of professional military contractors who were now used mainly against each other as the emperor sought to enforce his control, usually against French opposition, in northern Italy. The emperor Maximilian spent vast sums of money on wars in Italy that began in 1494 and lasted throughout his reign. 

The princes of Germany were just as aware of these facts as was the emperor. They rapidly shed his preferred system of taxation for the older contribution system. If they were to remain factors in the brave new world of military contracting, they needed to husband their resources. 

The fact the powerful needed money created problems for the poor. Throughout southern Germany, peasants found that access to what had previously been common land was being restricted. They were prevented from gathering firewood, that new services were demanded, and that new regulations were being imposed upon them. The bitterness engendered by these circumstances reached a boiling point when the Church discovered that it needed even more money for its purposes in the decades after 1500 and sought to suck that money out of Germany for use in its Italian heartland. 

As we approach the fatal year 1517, the year Martin Luther would post the ninety-five theses that sparked the Reformation, there are three characteristics of the Holy Roman Empire to bear in mind:

1. Power had to be negotiated between the emperor and his subjects.

2. Princes had a say in the religious organization of their territories.

3. Money was in short supply for everyone.

 

The Reformation and the city of Antwerp

The Church Martin Luther would challenge asserted its power through its control of two ways of reckoning time. One way was cyclical, featuring a calendar based on annual festivals celebrating the life and ministry of Christ. The other was linear, based on sacraments that defined a person’s relationship with God at various points during their life.

Martin Luther was a complex man. He had a bad temper and was exceptionally confident in his convictions. He was also possessed of unusual energy and courage.

Yet, the spread of print books soon gave rise to a new phenomenon as the fifteenth century turned into the sixteenth: the public intellectual. For the better part of the previous century, a small group of dedicated scholars, calling themselves humanists, had been recovering classical texts and, using their newfound knowledge of the past, had started to shape intellectual discourse. The most influential of these figures in the early fifteenth century was Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla. Poggio took it upon himself to “rescue” copies of classical texts buried in monasteries of southern Germany and France, having new copies made. He asserted that the study of human letters was a new area of learning. Valla took a different view, whose accomplishments included a Latin translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. He believed humanistic studies should be used to correct errors in the Christian tradition. One example was a stunning demonstration that a document known as the Donation of Constantine, which recorded Constantine’s proclamation of the pope as the leader of the Church, was an eighth-century fake. 

Despite their disagreements and ecclesiastical connections, Poggio and Valla showed that intellectual life need not depend on the Church. With the newfound taste in books that could guide life, new opportunities opened up for a new generation of intellectuals. Chief among these men was Desiderius Erasmus, who was unquestionably Europe’s most famous intellectual by the first decade of the sixteenth century. It was undoubtedly Europe’s most prominent academic was unquestionably Europe’s most famous intellectual the sixteenth century, the city of Antwerp-in books and in cloth. It was also—as were all the lands that now form Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, a part of Charles V’s empire. Once the possession of the dukes of Burgundy, these lands had passed into the Holy Roman Empire after the death of the last duke, Charles the Bold, in 1477.

Charles the Bold in about 1460, wearing the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, painted by Rogier van der Weyden:

In 1363, Philipp von Valois founded the House of Burgundy as a sideline of the French royal family of the Valois. This House of Burgundy relied on extensive territorial expansion, which led to an intermediate empire between France and the Holy Roman Empire, the southern part of which was the old Duchy of Burgundy and at times the Free County and the northern part of which was the Netherlands. After the death of the last male duke from the House of Valois, Charles the Bold, this rulership complex was divided in the Burgundian Wars (1477). Through the marriage of Maximilian to the heir to Charles the Bold, Maria of Burgundy, the House of Habsburg secured the (economic this rulership complex was divided) most important parts of tree County.

And of course, the earliest followers of Jesus (believed the long-promised ‘king of the Jews were Jews. The church was predominantly Jewish until after the first major war with Rome (A.D. 66-70), and not until after the catastrophic Bar Kokhba war (A.D. 132-135) did the Jewish church of Jerusalem come to an end, and a Gentile bishop succeeded the Jewish bishop there. Many centuries before the Ebionites Jewish Christians) would finally cease as a distinct and viable denomination within Christianity. Accordingly, for Jewish and Christian scholars today, the origins of Judaism and Christianity constitute a complex and interesting story whose interwoven threads should not be unraveled. Ironically, the mighty Roman Empire, which smashed the state of Israel in a series of punishing wars (from A. D. 66-135), was itself overrun by a messianic faith rooted in Israel’s sacred Scriptures and its ancient belief in the God of Abraham. All of this would be put once more on its head during the Reformation as new ways were searched for.

Pictured below is Maria of Austria (1528-1603), the daughter of Charles, who was the wife of Maximilian and Charles V’s mother:

The former lands of Charles the Bold had been divided into seventeen provinces, of which seven were north of the Rhine. Dutch was the primary language spoken in these areas, unlike the rest of Europe, where feudal forms of governance had never taken hold. The ten provinces south of the Rhine were Flemish. The major cities within each region maintained “ancient privileges” conferred upon them by the dukes of the past, as here too, feudal traditions had largely evaporated. These provinces had more excellent traditions of self-government. Among the most important aspects of civic government were that cities had the power to determine who was a citizen, the autonomy of their courts, and the right to elect their administrators. Another difference from most of Europe is that these provinces had elective assemblies known as states. In the middle of the fifteenth century, the dukes of Burgundy had begun to summon an assembly of all the states, known as the States-General. 

Charles V had been in Antwerp while he prepared to take up his position as emperor and was somewhat uncomfortable with the independence of the people he found there. Indeed, his decision to order the mass incineration of Luther’s works, widely read in Antwerp, may have been as much a statement about the people of Antwerp as it was a statement about Luther, toward whom his behavior would be more restrained.

The printing presses at the Plantin Moretus in Antwerp:

Plantin himself or his son-in-law Jan I Moretus may have been familiar with these two presses from around 1600. They have had an eventful career and are the oldest preserved printing presses in the world.

Thomas More was not the only nonconformist who found a Belgian publisher. On the far side of the North Sea, he regarded as dangerously heretical works from Antwerp. The area itself was soon home to Tyndale and Simon Fish. Their violently anti-establishment The Supplication of Beggars drew forth from More’s Supplication of Souls, the work in which he laid out a grisly vision of the torments imposed on the souls in Purgatory.

Despite Charles V’s hostility, publishers in Antwerp continued to print Luther’s writings. The fact hundreds of copies were burned between 1520 and 1522 shows how popular they were. There were various reasons for this popularity. One was the humanist movement, which had shaped and spawned greater literacy levels than elsewhere in Europe; another was the generally greater sophistication of the region’s well-developed urban society. Yet another was the introduction of early forms of capitalism connected to the area’s thriving cloth trade, brewing, and bulk trading, as well as its publishing industry. Economic change was loosening the vertical bonds that had kept people in complete submission to their overlords. Within this setting, persecution of pro-Lutheran publishers around Antwerp drove them a bit further north to cities like Leiden and Amsterdam. At the same time, persecution of individuals rounded up by the Inquisition, which Charles had dispatched to the region, fanned the flames of discontent.

Initially, the steadfast loyalty of the area’s administrators to Charles V prevented any reformation along the lines of what was occurring in Germany or Switzerland. Lutheran sympathizers learned to keep their views to themselves. The lack of a publicly organized reform movement opened the door to extremists (chiefly Anabaptists) shunned or persecuted in Protestant lands. By the 1530s, there was a distinct division between crypto-reformists of a Lutheran stamp and activist Anabaptists, whose rejection of the validity of infant baptism was generally a feature of a wholesale rejection of societal norms, which included a willingness to experience a hideous death for their beliefs. One hundred thirty-nine of the one hundred sixty-one persons executed for heresy at Antwerp between 1522 and 1565 were Anabaptists, as were fifty of the fifty-five individuals committed at Ghent.Prior to Luther’s translation, most Europeans encountered the Scriptures through the Latin Vulgate translation. Two differences in how these Latin and German Bibles translate Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 may help explain how Anabaptists (and other Reformers) diverged with Roman Catholic views on divorce and remarriage.

Not every Anabaptist wanted to die a painful death. As the 1530s ended, the further one was from Antwerp, the more likely it was that an Anabaptist could survive and behave in less overtly antisocial ways than had the reformers of Munster. Two men, in particular, stand out, Menno Simons and Dirk Phillips, whose more pacific form of Anabaptism was spread through publications in Dutch. When Calvinist preachers began to arrive in the area in the 1540s, they found that much of the population had turned from the Catholic Church, and most people were finding ways of concealing their true thoughts from the authorities. The literature that accompanied their arrival stressed subordination to the will of God, the notion that martyrdom was a supreme act of faith, and that God ordained the authority of princes. People were not yet ready to explore the implications of ordained the authority of princes Christian Religion, that minor officials in ancient states, such as the tribunes in Rome, had been appointed to limit the power of kings, and that there might be a similar power inherent to assemblies of the three orders of society (the three orders being the clergy, nobility, and commons). That view, which challenged the notion that God sanctified royal power, would ultimately become Calvin’s most important intellectual legacy blessed royal power. In the 16th century, Mechelen ruled the Low Countries. The city fulfilled the function of the administrative capital of the Netherlands (established by Margaret of Austria, whose statue is seen below in the center of Mechelen).

The late 1540s and early 1550s witnessed a newly aggressive effort to counter the reform movement. The Catholic Church reformed itself at the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1561 and promoted a new, intellectual response through the Society of Jesus (better known as the Jesuit order), founded in Paris in 1541 by the Spanish priest Ignatius Loyola. On the battlefield, Charles V won a smashing victory over the forces of the Schmalkalden League at Mühlberg in 1547. In 1553, Henry VIII’s older daughter Mary, a devout Roman Catholic, succeeded her brother Edward VI (a firm reformer) as ruler of England. The lesson Charles and his soon-to-be successors, Ferdinand in the Holy Roman Empire and Philip in Spain, should have taken away from the battle of Mühlberg was that there was no going back. Charles found he could not exploit his victory and finally conceded the point a year later at yet another Council of Augsburg, agreeing that Protestant princes could continue to rule their lands until the Council of Trent finished its work.

Below Mary Tudor. Painted in 1554 by Anthonis Mor, who was assigned to the task by Charles V. This painting was done while negotiations were in progress for Mary’s marriage to Philip V of Spain:

Charles’ moderation at Augsburg was not matched by conduct in England or the Netherlands. When she took the English throne, Mary adopted a rigid ideological line and tried to undo Cranmer’s reforms, which had put down deep roots in the six years of her brother’s reign. Cranmer was but one of the numerous victims of her efforts to restore the old Catholic ways. Rather than die at stake, many intellectuals fled to Switzerland and elsewhere, the Netherlands included. The years of repression, associated with the queen’s marriage to Philip II, had the effect of linking religious reform with national identity. When Mary died in November 1558, renewed reform returned with her half-sister Elizabeth (Figure 3.6). Indeed, Elizabeth’s religious views, always malleable according to circumstance, were less staunchly in favor of reform than those of the advisers who pushed the reestablishment of the national, but notably not Calvinist, Church in the immediate aftermath of her succession. The key figures of this era were members of the newer nobility. They tended to be as hostile to what they perceived as socially disruptive doctrines from Geneva, such as the democratic election of Church leaders, radical changes in the liturgy, and the notion that society’s leaders had to act responsibly in their dealings with their social inferiors, as they were to Catholicism. That would change, but not until the issues dividing Protestant from Catholic had reached new levels of violence on the continent.

The “Coronation Portrait” of Elizabeth I, by an unknown artist, makes a point about the legitimacy of her claim to the throne:

In 1549, Charles had taken a significant step toward centralizing imperial authority in the former Burgundian landstooking the “Pragmatic Sacentralizing the government of all seventeen provinces while sating that each region would retain its ancient privileges. Just how that was supposed to work was never made clear. The hamfisted actions of Philip II, who succeeded as ruler of the area when the exhausted Charles abdicated in 1556, created immediate tension. 

Philip had been excluded from any claim to the English throne by the terms of his marriage to Queen Mary and was tied up with a war against France as his wife lay dying. Now, operating from bases in Belgium, he won a significant victory over the French. Unfortunately, he had not learned the lessons that had gradually dawned on his father, who had died a few months before Mary, namely that battlefield victory rarely led to political success and that all power had to be negotiated. 

In the long run, pretty much the only thing Philip gained from his treaty with France was an end to the expense of fighting a war. The cost of the war had put a severe strain on his relations with the local nobility (especially those based north of the Rhine) who had been called upon to pay for it. Philip was somewhat suspicious of this group, as he sensed that they were unenthusiastic about Catholicism. So it was that when he returned to Spain, he divided the government of the region between his half-sister Margaret (the result of an illicit affair between his father and a palace servant many years before), who ruled over the ten southern provinces, and William of Orange, a local notable, who was granted the seven northern provinces. William, whose father was the duke of Nassau, a territory in the heart of the modern Netherlands, had obtained princely status when his uncle, prince of the region of Orange in southern France, had died in 1544. 

William, also known as William the Silent because of his ability to conceal his true thoughts from those he dealt with, was cautiously supportive of the Calvinist tendencies among the people in the regions under his charge. This was even though he had been given a solid Catholic upbringing as one of the terms of his inheritance of the state of Orange. Before his appointment in 1559, he had also been among Philip’s favorites. 

The tensions between Margaret’s Catholic administration and the sentiments of William’s subjects and those of other nobles led to rifts within the governing group in the years after Philip. Simply put, Mary’s court’s inquisition into the religious beliefs of the people of the seventeen provinces seemed an outrageous violation of the principle that the states would retain their ancient privileges. Detesting Antoine Perrenot de Granville (1517-1586), minister of King Philip II of Spain, he played a significant role in the early stages of the Netherlands’ revolt against Philip’s rule.

Margaret’s chief minister and manager of the Inquisition, William, became increasingly outspoken in his opposition to the active repression of reformers, which he blamed on de Granville. 

At the same time that William was attacking de Granville, a new theme began to emerge in contemporary literature. In 1557, for instance, Peter Dathenus published a book entitled Christian Account of a Dispute Held within Oudenaarde. He argued, following Calvin, that while good Christians should be subordinate even to tyrannical authority, lower secular magistrates had a duty to resist tyrants. Five years later, Protestant ministers gathered at Antwerp and stated that it was permissible to break co-religionists out of jail. A year earlier, Guy de Bray, a minister at Antwerp, while arguing that all people should obey their princes, boldly claimed that princes should avoid persecuting people for their faith. A contemporary, Pieter-Anastasius Pieterszoon Overd’hage de Zuttere (born 1520 in Gent, died 1604 in Leiden), stated that the government should limit itself entirely to secular affairs. These views accorded well with those of civic magistrates who were concerned about what they saw as wholesale violations of their ancient privileges. 

The writings of de Bray and  Zuttere articulated the issues lying behind the bold statement that William of Orange made at a meeting of German princes in 1564, that monarchs should not rule over the souls of their subjects (a point that was likely just as shocking for Protestants as it would have been for Catholics). He then joined a protest against religious repression launched by notables of his region in 1565. Protestors maintained their loyalty to Philip while objecting to the conduct of his officials. There was worse to come. 

In 1566–1567, widespread rioting broke out in Antwerp and rapidly spread throughout the region as mobs began destroying religious images in churches. There were occasional efforts on the imperial authorities to suggest that the mass action was carried out with such assurance that it appeared the rioters had been appointed to their task by members of local governments. On the other side, as in the Remonstrance written by de Bray shortly before his execution, it was plainly stated that when the demands of conscience clashed with temporal authority, the good Christian should follow conscience. The critical point which distinguishes de Bray’s statement from Luther’s at Worms is that Luther was explicitly speaking for himself, while the author of the Remonstrance was speaking for society as a whole. Johannes Michaellam, writing a Declaration of the Church or Community of God, went even further. He stated that government officials who infringed on the freedom of those for whose protection they were appointed were “traitors,” and God appointed lower magistrates to silence evil kings. This was a very long way from the doctrine that martyrdom was good for someone. 

The gradual coordination between theological and political thinking on the subject of tyranny and political legitimacy was given a quick shove by the arrival of the duke of Alva, the Spanish general whom an enraged Philip had charged with reestablishing Catholic authority eradicating reformers. He immediately ratcheted up the level of violence. One of the duke’s first things was set up a local inquisition, which he called the Council of Troubles. Among the many who were executed in the next few months were several leading nobles. A powerful response and cry for aid, composed by Marnix van St. Aldegonde, asserted that a prince had no right to take any action concerning his country without the assent of the governed. According to van St. Aldegonde, the regional councils, or states, were the true source of legitimate power, and so, a ruler needed to govern “after a prescribed form of laws and the ordinances of the states.” According to this emerging line of reasoning, no longer was Philip II the victim of evil ministers. Rather, he, himself, was now the source from which evil flowed. 

William of Orange was now summoned to appear before the Council of Troubles. With him went a man named Jacob van Wesembeke, who enunciated with clarity the view that legitimate government rested upon community liberties and privileges and the authority of the states. Assisted by van Wesembeke, William set his pen to paper, producing a series of pamphlets blaming the current troubles on the brutality of Granville and asserting that: 

You will know that by the king’s own proper consent you are free and released from the oath and obedience you owe him if he or others in his name infringe on the promises and conditions on which you have accepted and received him until finally every right has been restored.

William and his supporters continued to write, even when his attempt to expel Alva by force of arms failed miserably. As a result, he was confined to bases in Germany until, in 1572, the seven northern provinces named him their governor or Sta(a)holder. The crucial point here is that political theorists had moved away from delegitimizing their rivals to conferring legitimacy on a leader whom they chose. 

The interplay between the prince and regional governments continued for the next few years, with the lead tending to come from regional governments, something that would presumably not have been imaginable were it not for the congruence that had been achieved between Calvinism and political practice. In 1576, William led the northern provinces in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to assert the south. This “Pacification of Ghent” had been sparked by a major mutiny, which had destroyed Antwerp and temporarily incapacitated the Spanish regime in the region. Following the failure of William’s intervention, magistrates in the seven provinces of Holland took matters into their own hands, declaring their union. This treaty, the Union of Utrecht, would be the first formal constitutional document in European history. It declared that: 

So those from the Duchy of Gelderland and county of Zutphen, and those from the counties and regions of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, and the Ommelanden between river Eems and Sea of Lauwers have thought it advisable to ally and to unite more closely and particularly, not to withdraw from the General Union set up at the Pacification at Ghent, but rather to strengthen it and to protect themselves against all the difficulties that their enemy’s practices, attacks or outrages might bring upon them, and finally, to make clear how in such cases the provinces must behave and can defend themselves against hostilities, as well as to avoid any further separation of the provinces and their particular members. They further stated that the United Provinces would work together in the future, have a common currency, a common army, and:

Concerning the matter of religion: Holland and Zeeland . . . may introduce . . . such regulations as they consider proper for the peace and welfare of the provinces, towns, and their particular members and for the preservation of all people, either secular or clerical, their properties and rights, provided that by the Pacification of Ghent each individual enjoys the freedom of religion and no one is persecuted or questioned about his faith. The Union of Utrecht as a pact for mutual defense stopped short of declaring independence from Spain. That would come two years later, when the Dutch states, on July 21, 1581, decided to “unanimously and deliberately” declare that Philip had forfeited “all hereditary right to the sovereignty of these countries,” and, on the advice of William, invited the French duke of Anjou to take charge. The French alliance failed miserably, and the states came back to William (Figure 3.7). By the time William fell victim to an assassin’s bullet in 1584, making him the first world leader to be murdered by a gunman, a new nation was emerging and developing the capacity to stand independently.

William of Orange was painted by Adriaen Thomaz Key in 1579 when he was at the height of his power. Notably, William is depicted in civilian clothing rather than armor:

At first glance, William’s story looks different from those of earlier Protestant movements. Still, Luther might have been pleased to draw a line from his assertion of individual conscience to the statement that human communities should be based on moral principles. The sixty years from the Diet of Worms to the Dutch declaration of independence changed the intellectual direction of Europe. They made it possible to imagine the creation of territorial states based upon citizenship rights rather than dependency on lordships, on the free exchange of ideas rather than the threat of Purgatory. 

At first sight, the Dutch achievement might seem different from the German and English Reformations. The similarities are more significant than the differences. First and foremost was the ideological failure of Philip’s regime; without that, there would have been no revolt. Second, the realities of modern warfare meant that a king had to work with his subjects to see a benefit from supporting the costs imposed upon them. This, Philip appears to have been constitutionally incapable of doing. Third, for all that John Calvin ran a theocratic state in Geneva, nothing in his teaching especially enabled the creation of a new political entity. A belief in predestination that images should be destroyed that services should be conducted in the indigenous language, that priests should be able to marry, and that the substances of the Eucharist were not transubstantiated, in and of themselves were insufficient doctrines upon which to build a state. It was William’s different belief that Calvin would have rejected out of hand, that a state should be built upon freedom of conscience that made the big difference. This, combined with his ability to support armies in the field and his capacity for working with local governments, made him successful. Without the religious reform movement, William would have remained a Habsburg functionary. Without William, the religious reform movement in the Netherlands would have continued to offer little more to its members than a fast track to incineration.

 

Society is bound by both practice and belief.

The sixteenth-century Reformation disrupted the centuries-old alliance between secular and religious authority that defined Europe’s social, political, and intellectual order, making possible the emergence of societies that admitted a diversity of religious opinion and philosophical experiment. The effect of the Reformation was to extend the notion of a state from a community bound by shared practice to a society bound by both practice and belief.

There can be little doubt that Luther would have failed in taking his stand against indulgences if he could not have counted on support from Frederick of Saxony. Nor is it imaginable that Cranmer and Cromwell could have built a new Church that was a hybrid of reformist thinking and traditional episcopal governance if Henry had not been desperate for a solution to his marital problems. But Henry’s break with Rome was made possible because Luther had shown how papal authority could be challenged. William of Orange’s achievement was perhaps the most astonishing of all because he built on the passions of persecuted extremists to construct a new state independent of what appeared to be the most significant power Europe had seen since the end of the Roman state in the fifth century CE. The common factor here is the government of Charles V.

As Holy Roman emperor, Charles V is a figure who is in many ways evocative of the Roman emperor Heraclius. Heraclius failed to recognize the weakness of his empire in the wake of the Persian war and then proceeded to alienate many of the subjects who returned to his sway after years of Persian rule. If he had realized that he needed to negotiate his authority rather than impose it, the door to the Arab conquest might not have opened. Charles’ open contempt for his German subjects and his evident weakness in the face of the challenge of the Ottoman state invited revolt. Like Muhammad, Luther emerged from the context of a religious reform movement to play a crucial role in uniting opposition to the status quo. Also, like Muhammad, he did not shape the state that emerged as a result of his preaching, that was left to others who took his ideas in directions that he often did not approve of. His poor relationship with Henry VIII is a case in point.

Like Heraclius, Charles V was a decent general, but he could not recognize that victory on the battlefield was insufficient to ensure a political result. Heraclius and Charles were not the only people to have this problem. The bloody course of European history after Charles’ abdication led to even greater changes. The principles of royal absolutism were now undermined by thinkers who would study the classical texts of the Middle Ages to be recovered by the humanists of the previous century. The ability to control media, the key to Luther’s initial success, will remain a critical aspect of disruptions to come. The dissemination of ideas beyond the reach of government censorship will be a crucial factor in the development of new ways to analyze society and new concepts about the nature of authority. The Reformation demonstrated once and for all that efforts to repress modernity with the tools of medievalism.

 

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