Luther was a monk and university lecturer in Wittenberg, Germany, when in 1517 he composed and printed his famous 95 Theses, which challenged the pope’s authority and the church's profitable sale of indulgences. Although he had hoped to spur renewal from within the church, in 1521 he was summoned before the Diet of Worms and excommunicated.
Sheltered by Friedrich, Elector of Saxony, Luther translated the Bible into German and continued his output of vernacular pamphlets. (But in the German Peasants' War of 1524–1525, inspired in part by Luther’s empowering “priesthood of all believers,” Luther sided with Germany’s princes against the violent revolt.) By the Reformation’s end, Lutheranism had become the state religion throughout much of Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltics.
The Rise of Calvinism
The Swiss Reformation began in 1519 with the sermons of Ulrich Zwingli, whose teachings largely paralleled Luther’s. In 1541 John Calvin, a French Protestant who had spent the previous decade in exile writing his “Institutes of the Christian Religion,” was invited to settle in Geneva, Switzerland, and put his Reformed doctrine—which stressed God’s power and humanity’s predestined fate—into practice. The result was a theocratic regime of enforced, austere morality.
Nonetheless, Calvin’s Geneva became a hotbed for Protestant exiles, and his doctrines quickly spread to Scotland, France, Transylvania and the Low Countries of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, where Dutch Calvinism became a religious and economic force for the next 400 years.
In England, the Reformation began with Henry VIII’s quest for a male heir. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could remarry, the English king declared in 1534 that he alone should be the final authority in matters relating to the English church. Henry dissolved England’s monasteries to confiscate their wealth and worked to place the Bible in the hands of the people. Beginning in 1536, every parish was required to have a copy.
After Henry’s death, England tilted toward Calvinist-infused Protestantism during Edward VI’s six-year reign and then endured five years of reactionary Catholicism under Mary I. In 1559 Elizabeth I took the throne and, during her 44-year reign, cast the Church of England as a “middle way” between Calvinism and Catholicism, with vernacular worship and a revised Book of Common Prayer.
The Vatican was slow to respond systematically to the theological and publicity innovations of Luther and the other reformers. The Council of Trent, which met off and on from 1545 through 1563, articulated the Catholic Church’s answer to the problems that triggered the Reformation and to the reformers themselves.
The Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation era grew more spiritual, more literate and more educated. New religious orders, notably the Jesuits, combined rigorous spirituality with a globally minded intellectualism, while mystics such as Teresa of Avila injected new passion into the older orders. Inquisitions across Europe and the Americas were reorganized to fight the threat of Protestant heresy.
Along with the religious consequences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came deep and lasting political changes. Northern Europe’s new religious and political freedoms came at a great cost, with decades of rebellions, wars and bloody persecutions. The Thirty Years’ War alone may have cost Germany 40 percent of its population.
But the Reformation’s positive repercussions can be seen in the intellectual and cultural flourishing it inspired on all sides of the schism—in the strengthened universities of Europe, the inspirational Lutheran church music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the elegant baroque altarpieces of Peter Paul Rubens and even the vigorous capitalism of Dutch Calvinist merchants.
