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THE LONG EUROPEAN
REFORMATION
RELIGION, POLITICAL CONFLICT,
AND THE SEARCH FOR CONFORMITY,
1350–1750

Peter G. Wallace
The Long European Reformation
 European History in Perspective
General Editor: Jeremy Black

Benjamin Arnold Medieval Germany

Ronald Asch The Thirty Years’ War
Christopher Bartlett Peace, War and the European Powers, 1814–1914
Robert Bireley The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700
Donna Bohanan Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France
Arden Bucholz Moltke and the German Wars, 1864–1871
Patricia Clavin The Great Depression, 1929–1939
Paula Sutter Fichtner The Habsburg Monarchy, 1490–1848
Mark Galeotti Gorbachev and his Revolution
David Gates Warfare in the Nineteenth Century
Martin P. Johnson The Dreyfus Affair
Peter Musgrave The Early Modern European Economy
J. L. Price The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century
A. W. Purdue The Second World War
Christopher Read The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System
Francisco J. Romero-Salvado Twentieth-Century Spain
Matthew S. Seligmann and Roderick R. McLean
Germany from Reich to Republic, 1871–1918
Brendan Simms The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850
David Sturdy Louis XIV
Hunt Tooley The Western Front
Peter Waldron The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917
Peter G. Wallace The Long European Reformation
James D. White Lenin
Patrick Williams Philip II

European History in Perspective

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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
THE LONG EUROPEAN
REFORMATION
RELIGION, POLITICAL CONFLICT,
AND THE SEARCH FOR C ONFORMITY,
1350–1750

Peter G. Wallace
© Peter G. Wallace 2004
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wallace, Peter George, 1952–
The long European Reformation : religion, political conflict, and the search
for conformity, 1350–1750 / Peter G. Wallace.
p. cm. — (European history in perspective)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0–333–64450–6 — ISBN 0–333–64451–4 (pbk.)
1. Reformation. 2. Europe—Politics and government. 3. Christianity—
Europe. I. Title. II. European history in perspective (Palgrave (Firm))
BR305.3.W35 2003
274—dc21
2003042969
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
Printed in China
To Shelley, Erik, and Evan
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

List of Maps viii

Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1

Part I The Warp: Threads of Reformation Histories,

1350–1650 23
1 The Late Medieval Crisis, 1348–1517 25
2 Resistance, Renewal, and Reform, 1414–1521 54
3 Evangelical Movements and Confessions, 1521–59 82
4 Reformation and Religious War, 1550–1650 118

Part II The Weft: Making Sense of the Long European

Reformation 163
5 Settlements, 1600–1750: Church Building,
State Building, and Social Discipline 165
6 Rereading the Reformation through Gender Analysis 202
Conclusions 217

Notes 223
Select Bibliography 235
Index 246

vii
 LIST OF MAPS

1 European political frontiers in 1350 40

2 European confessional and political landscape in 1650 161
3 European political boundaries in 1750 170

viii
 ABBREVIATIONS

AAEB Archives de l’Ancien Evêché de Bâle, Porrentruy (Switzerland).

AHR The American Historical Review.
ARG Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte / Archive for Reformation History.
EME Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History, ed. Euan Cameron
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
ERE Pettegree, Andrew (ed.), The Early Reformation in Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
HEH Brady, Thomas A., Jr, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy
(eds), The Handbook of European History, 1400–1600 (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1994–5), 2 vols.
JMH Journal of Modern History.
OER The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, edited by Hans
Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4 vols.
P&P Past and Present.
RNC Scribner, Bob, Roy Porter, and Mikuláš Teich (eds), The
Reformation in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1994).

Convention on dates

When appearing with a set of dates (e.g. *1547–1560), the asterisk signifies
the years of a monarch or pope’s reign. Sets of dates without an asterisk
mark the individual’s life span.

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Any book project involves many, many people. It is impossible to fully

recognize all who have helped shape this work. I would like to thank
Jeremy Black for inviting me to participate in this series and for his
continued guidance and encouragement. I also wish to recognize the
late Heiko Oberman for his critical reading of the initial proposal, and
for the suggestions that dramatically altered its form. Tom and Kathy Brady,
as life-long mentors, have provided critical advice throughout the long
process of bringing this work to fruition. I owe intellectual debts to many
other colleagues whose writings have informed my argument, for the
search for historical understanding is a collective endeavour and the fruit
of an ongoing intellectual conversation. I would, however, like to offer
special recognition to Marc Forster, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Jim Farr,
and Kaspar von Greyerz, who in conversations and their written work
have left a deep impression on my own thinking. I would like to thank
Felicity Noble and Sonya Barker at Palgrave for their guidance through
various stages in the process of bringing this book to print and, especially,
to thank Terka Acton for her patience, encouragement, and critical
reading of the manuscript. She along with the readers at Palgrave offered
insights and suggested revisions that have made this a better text. My
work on this manuscript received financial support through a Trustees
Research Grant from Hartwick College and through release time provided
by an appointment as Winifred Wandersee Scholar in Residence. I would
like to thank my colleagues at Hartwick College, especially the Dean of
the Faculty, Susan Gotsch, and my dear friends in the History Department,
for their support of my research and writing agenda. I would also like to
acknowledge the input of my students whose curiosity about aspects of
the Reformation have helped frame this text, and especially Megan

x
 Acknowledgements xi

Raphoon and Courtney DeMayo, who have served as my ideal audience

for this work. Finally and most importantly, I dedicate this work to my
wife Shelley, for her faith in me and for the innumerable sacrifices she
has made to help this book become a reality, and to our sons Erik and
Evan, who shared that burden.
This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 1776, the Catholic pastor for the small town of Munster
in Upper Alsace, Antoine Maurer, petitioned his religious superior, the
bishop of Basel, to order Maurer’s patron, the Benedictine abbot in
Munster, for an increase in wages. Maurer served Munster and a half-
dozen hamlets peppering the surrounding ridges. The petition listed
the religious services which the priest performed to meet the spiritual
needs of his flock. One duty was to bring the consecrated host (the
viaticum) to sick and dying parishioners day or night in all weather.
Maurer would ride a donkey while the churchwarden preceded him with
an illuminated lantern and a handbell. When they encountered some-
one on the road, the churchwarden rang the bell to let the mountain folk
know that they should kneel to honour the real presence of Christ as it
passed. Maurer commented that, because it was a new practice, Lutherans
needed to be told what it was about, and that he had “not yet met a single
one who has refused to [kneel] after having been instructed”.1
Except for the presence of Lutherans, Maurer’s frustrations with his
ecclesiastical superiors and his experiences with the mountain folk could
easily have occurred in 1376, four hundred years earlier. For centuries
pastors and patrons had bickered over fees and obligations, while rural
Christians relied on town-dwelling priests to provide for their spiritual
needs. Martin Luther and other sixteenth-century reformers had sought
to shift the religious leadership’s focus away from fees and payments as
part of a renewal of the medieval Church. More importantly, the
reformers hoped to restore and clarify the core tenets of the faith, which
they would then make accessible to all Christians. Maurer’s experience,
260 years after Luther posted his theses, suggests that this realization of
a reformed Christianity had been gradual and incomplete. Great distances

1
2 The Long European Reformation

still separated the image of coherent pastoral blocks of indoctrinated

Roman Catholic or Lutheran subjects harboured by spiritual and secular
officials, and the reality of local conditions.
Most students, when asked to describe some aspect of the European
Reformation, recall dramatic events such as Luther’s obstinate self-defence
at the Imperial Diet of Worms, Calvin’s triumphant return to Geneva in
1541 after three years in exile, Henry VIII’s quest for a divorce and
a male heir, or the bloody repression in 1535 of the Anabaptists at
Münster in Westphalia. Their stories begin with Luther’s nailing of
ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and end sometime
in the 1550s with the religious peace of Augsburg or the Elizabethan
Settlement. This has been the narrative framework for many textbook
histories of the Reformation. 2 This traditional model normally assumes
that the late medieval Catholic Church was institutionally corrupt, spirit-
ually bankrupt, and theologically muddled, until courageous reformers
such as Luther and Calvin offered morally grounded and theologically
coherent visions of reformed religious practice, which promised to
restore their followers to the pristine state of primitive Christianity.
In this older view, Protestants swept away the Church’s decadent “popish”
structure and replaced it with a more disciplined ecclesiastical order,
while in preaching God’s word, the reformers would root out the barely
Christianized and superstitious practices of folk religions and lay the
foundation for modern, rational faith.
Much of Reformation history has been written from the Protestant
reformers’ perspective and has embraced this historical model, yet even
sympathetic studies of the sixteenth-century Catholic Reformation have
emphasized its distance from medieval faith and its role in instituting
modern Catholicism.3 Thus whatever their own religious background,
historians have taken the reformers at their word and viewed fifteenth-
century Christianity as in need of reform, and from that perspective
have emphasized the differences between post-Reformation religiosity and
the practices of unreformed medieval Christians. In this dramatic vision
of Christian history, the Reformation ushers in modern Christianity. 4

Thinking Historically

People use the word “history” to define two distinct phenomena: past
events and the accounts of past events. 5 In the historical past, wars,
famines, and revolutions happened as people confronted difficult and
 Introduction 3

often poorly understood choices and acted on them, with results that,
more often than not, did not meet their expectations. We also apply the
term “history” to accounts of past events and their impact on the historical
present, but ironically in historical accounts the present also filters our
understanding of the past.6 The ancient Greeks coined the word “history”,
by which they meant learning by inquiry, and until the Enlightenment,
historical research and writing maintained this open intellectual agenda.
In the last 200 years, history has become a professional discipline prac-
tised by rigorously trained research scholars, who, through the systematic
exploration of documents contemporary to the events under analysis,
combined with the “objective”, non-partisan, and scientific demeanour
required of a professional, construct “as accurately as possible” accounts
of past historical events.7 Recently, however, this commitment to historical
objectivity and scientific methods has come under fire from a cluster of
theories loosely gathered into a perspective labelled post-modernist.
In light of post-modernist critiques, Keith Jenkins’s brief essay
Re-thinking History provides a helpful introduction to historiography;
that is, the study of writing histories. 8 Jenkins argues that from the per-
spective of post-modernism, the past must be understood as a complex,
chaotic, and unknowable landscape. Historical accounts construct window
frames through which we may view this landscape. Both the way we
build our frames and the way we look through them are habits learned
as we are taught to think historically. What we see, when we read any
historical account of the Reformation, is framed both by the text’s author
and by our own learned preconceptions. My window frame could high-
light theologians, or peasants, or princes. You as a reader will view the
landscape, which I have framed, through your own unique perspective.
It is in your effort to resolve the tension between your frame and mine
that learning occurs. What follows, then, is an account of the European
Reformation based on my reading of the landscape of historical events
through the “sediment of previous interpretations” or, more precisely,
what I have learned in resolving the tension between my preconceptions
and the accounts or frames of other authors, who themselves have wrestled
with the same learning process.
As a teacher of Reformation history, I have learned that recognizing
the personal values and baggage we all bring to this subject is important
in how we understand its historical legacies. Those of you who read this
book bring to it extremely diverse religious and personal backgrounds.
Many of you have had no formal contact with Christianity, and even
those of you who have been raised as Christians or have come to faith
4 The Long European Reformation

later in your lives confront Christian history differently. Some of you seek
to understand the world through the prism of faith, while others do not.
As your guide, you should know that I was raised in the Catholic faith
and as a young man briefly studied for the priesthood. I have since parted
ways with the Roman Catholic Church. As a trained historian, my goal is
to approach the material carefully from a critical and self-critical per-
spective, but my understanding of the subject remains entangled in my
life experiences, as will yours.

Historical Accounts of the Reformation

The historical participants in the sixteenth-century reform movements

defended and justified their actions as part of an over-arching historical
drama written by God. At the core of the conflict between the reformers
and the Church lay the account of this drama, the Bible, which human
authors had composed through divine inspiration. The last chapter of
the Word of God had been written less than a century after Jesus’s death.
Medieval spiritual leaders envisioned their Church as the living Body of
Christ guided through history by the Holy Spirit, and thus whatever
new traditions they established served merely as continuing expressions
of the kerygma, the original model of Christian life in the Bible. Neverthe-
less, at issue were conflicting interpretations of that model, and any cry
for reform (reformatio) of the Church or renewal (renovatio) of Christian life
hinged on the relationship between the textual word of God and its
“inspired” re-articulation throughout history by the Church. For all par-
ties, the earliest Christian community of Jesus’s apostles and disciples,
the original Church (ekklesia), served as the spiritual template for the
“true” Church.
We normally see faith as a personal commitment and experience, but
pre-modern reformers understood faith as a communal expression and
practised their faith in public collective rituals. Shared commitment and
correct ritual were essential for salvation. Moreover, then as now, the
Christian community’s identity derived from imagined bonds to the
historical past of the apostolic Church and the historical future of
Christ’s second coming, when unbelievers would be cast into lakes of fire
and the saved, both living and dead, would gather under God as
a “communion of saints” in a millennial kingdom of Christ. For sixteenth-
century men and women, imbued with Christian faith, this historical
model not only helped make sense of their experiences, it also endowed
 Introduction 5

their lives with meaning. Nearly all of them also believed that Christ’s
second coming was at hand, and their conviction gave them courage to act.
In this charged atmosphere, Martin Luther’s opposition to the Church
openly challenged its claim to both the apostolic past and the apocalyptic
future and triggered wide-scale political, religious, and social unrest.
In the violent struggles which followed, chroniclers in all camps defended
their actions and interpreted their successes and setbacks in light of
a spiritual struggle between God and the Devil waged in temporal history.
Most of these earliest accounts of the Reformation were written by active
participants, in the heat of controversy, whose texts smeared their oppon-
ents and glorified their own party. 9 Over the ensuing generations, the
bloodshed among Protestants and Catholics only deepened religious
divisions, and partisan historians shaped their accounts of the reform
movements as propaganda, calumny, or apologetics. The thirst for the
security of divine sanction for one’s actions made it extremely difficult to
see anything of value in an opposing view.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the reform groups had gelled into
separate religious camps, which historians have come to call “confessions”,
from the Latin word confessio (acknowledgement). Reform leaders, both
Catholic and Protestant, hammered out tenets of faith that their followers
had to acknowledge to affirm their membership in the true Christian
community. Meanwhile decades of civil and inter-dynastic war had
added massacres, martyrdoms, and persecutions to be commemorated
in historical accounts, but the skein of violence had also exhausted the
participants without determining God’s chosen Church. By 1695, when
Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff first defined the Reformation as an era in
Church history rather than a movement, confessionally minded historians
had to accept that the Reformation’s historical legacy had been to divide
Christianity rather than cleanse and restore it. 10 By the beginning of
the eighteenth century, all four major confessions, Catholic, Lutheran,
Calvinist, and Anglican, had spawned minority factions or non-conformist
movements whose members read the historical roots of these churches
differently. Henceforth, there could be no consensus account, no single
window frame, to illuminate the Reformation landscape.
By 1750 European politics, society, and culture had begun to undergo
a set of tectonic shifts which ushered in the modern era. The Enlighten-
ment movement, philosophical idealism, and liberalism promoted new,
secular visions of history. Confessional historical scholarship continued
to operate, but the Reformation’s historical significance came into question.
The emerging professional approach to history relegated the study of
6 The Long European Reformation

the Reformation to its role in nurturing the modern state, modern society,
and modern individualism. 11 In this framework, Protestantism, which
predominated in the industrial powers of England, Germany, and the
United States, emerged as a modernizing force. Leopold von Ranke,
Max Weber, and Ernst Troeltsch composed critical assessments of the
relationship between the Reformation and modernity, but Reformation
studies never spawned a paradigmatic account, a widely accepted view,
of the era’s place in the origins of modern history.12 Meanwhile in an
increasingly professionalized environment, Reformation historiography
became almost exclusively the provenance of Church historians, most of
whom were churchmen themselves.
The historical profession and the volume of Reformation scholarship
have mushroomed in the past fifty years. Much of the new research,
loosely described as social history, has turned away from accounts of the
political, social, and intellectual elites to explore the historical landscape
of the common folk, of women rich and poor, of children, and of mar-
ginalized groups. Down to the mid-1970s the dialogue between social and
Church historians remained limited, but recently Reformation studies
have opened themselves to numerous new influences. The diversity and
depth of the scholarship prohibit any short overview, but this text will
attempt to highlight these new insights and perspectives where they
apply.13

Framing this Text

Most recent reinterpretations of the European Reformation have chal-

lenged the decadent image of late medieval Christianity, the ability of
the reformers to distance themselves from earlier patterns of belief, and the
success of the reformers in indoctrinating their religious values into the
hearts and minds of their followers. In light of these challenges,
the following account of the European Reformation movements will
broaden its scope in terms of both time and perspectives of inquiry. First,
it will begin with the fourteenth-century demographic and social crisis
and its effects on the Christian Church, which was so deeply embedded
in late medieval society. Secondly, it will connect the fifteenth-century
efforts at ecclesiastical renewal and reform with the Protestant evangelical
movements of the first half of the sixteenth century, which sought to rede-
fine social and moral order on the basis of the gospels. We will see how
the political, social, and religious forces unleashed by Luther and other
 Introduction 7

reformers drove their movements in unanticipated directions that ultim-

ately divided Christians into separate religious communities. Thirdly,
the text will trace the efforts in the late sixteenth century to rebuild social
and religious order on a local and regional basis through the establishment
of official churches, closely aligned with political authorities in towns,
principalities, and kingdoms. Unfortunately, within a generation the
blending of political ambition with religious righteousness would produce
a bloody round of civil and inter-dynastic wars which embroiled the
entire continent. Finally, this text will highlight the late seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century efforts of reformed elites to inculcate “established”
doctrines and practices among congregations and parish communities,
who would resist and refine these confessionalizing agendas to meet
communal and personal needs.
Throughout this study, the various confessional communities will be
treated as analogous movements. Though one might argue that there
were multiple reformations, this essay frames its subject in the singular.
This comparative perspective will focus on the common issues faced by
all reformers, but it is not intended to obscure their different resolutions.
Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Anabaptists, and Catholics fashioned
dissimilar church structures, worshipped in self-consciously distinct
ways, and defined the proper social behaviour of a Christian man or
woman differently. As religious acculturation progressed, misconceptions
regarding other Christians who observed their faith differently produced
animosity, alienation, and sometimes violence. In time, however, the quest
for order within emerging states and the growing emphasis on newer
forms of social cohesion and animosity, defined in ethnic or national
terms, produced grudging religious toleration among most Christians.14
In all, by exploring the gradual integration of reformed values into the
belief systems of common Christians, this text offers its readers a bridge
between the dramatic course of structural change and the more mundane
progress of new beliefs and practices in the churches, homes, and death-
beds of early modern Europe.
All religions are imbedded in the societies and cultures to which they
bring meaning. Religious history cannot be separated from the study of
political, social, or economic change. Thus Reformation history cannot
confine itself to Church history or to a study of the evolution of theology.
Nor can students of the Reformation effectively make sense of the histor-
ical experience from a single secular perspective such as class struggle or
state building.15 Religious beliefs were deeply woven into the fabric of
early modern European culture from the princely courts to the village
8 The Long European Reformation

green. Ecclesiastical institutions supported social elites economically,

justified their superiority, and defended the political culture they dom-
inated. To study the Reformation any text must consider historical
changes in society and politics.
The scope of analysis which I have proposed would require a large
volume, if not a multi-volume study, bringing together a team of inter-
disciplinary specialists from diverse national and confessional back-
grounds.16 This is impractical for a short introductory text. Thus the
following essay can only offer a framework for a comprehensive analysis
of a cluster of historical experiences extending over four centuries. To
introduce the reader to the long European Reformation, the text will
mix narrative and analytical sections grounded on current scholarship
in the field. In a sense it will serve as a web-site. I have divided the text
into two parts. The first chronicles key events from 1350 to 1650 in order
to plot institutional, ideological, and political changes over time and to
provide a background for the analytical chapters. The second part
explores the Reformation’s legacies and limits in the century after the
Peace of Westphalia. In weaving the fabric of this book, the warp will be
the narrative account and the weft the analytical threads of argument.
Finally the notes and selected bibliography will identify important recent
works, primarily those available in English, so that the reader will be able
to conduct further research on the topics addressed in the book.

Ancient Christianities: The Templates for the True Church

To begin to build a common frame for our account of the Reformation,

we need to consider the religious, political, and social legacies medieval
Christianity presented its reformers. What follows is a brief and schematic
account of Christian church history up until 1350 with a particular focus
on aspects that will re-emerge later in the book. This synopsis will empha-
size the impact of changing social and political contexts on Christian
faith, which, you must remember, was not how the reformers approached
this story. They perceived ancient Christian writings and the primitive
Church as an unchanging and divinely constructed whole. For the reform-
ers, the medieval Church had deviated from its true original form, which
they strove to realize once again. Even those Roman Catholics who
defended the historical innovations of the medieval papacy did so with
the assumption that these new traditions derived from the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit as part of a divine historical plan.
 Introduction 9

The original followers of Jesus of Nazareth were Jews. During his life-
time, neither he nor they wrote down his message or their experiences.
What we know of Jesus derives from diverse and sometimes conflicting
texts written thirty to seventy years after his death by followers who
interwove personal memories and oral traditions with their developing
sense of his mission.17 Sometime in the late 20s CE Jesus of Nazareth
preached and attracted a band of followers in Galilee, a region in north-
ern Palestine within the Roman Empire. Roman officials normally toler-
ated local religions, but unlike most subjects the Jews adhered to a single
faith and felt that they were the chosen people of their God, Yahweh.
Centuries earlier the Jews had forged a significant regional kingdom,
which had fallen, they believed, because of their failure to honour
Yahweh. Through the words of prophets, who literally served as God’s
mouthpieces, Yahweh had promised to restore this kingdom. Under
Roman rule many poorer Jews had come to anticipate a political revival
through a messiah, one anointed by God. Before, during, and after
Jesus’s lifetime, a number of messiahs had risen on waves of social anger
directed against both the Romans and collaborating Jewish elites in
Jerusalem. Jesus was one of them. He claimed intimate knowledge of
God, preached the coming of God’s kingdom, taught through parables
drawn from the experiences of the common folk, and practised a social
and gender egalitarianism which troubled Jewish elites. When Jesus
confronted Jewish officials with the threat of disorder in Jerusalem, the
local Roman officials had him arrested and put to death. Many messianic
Jews believed that Yahweh would raise the dead to help restore the king-
dom. Following his execution by crucifixion, Jesus’s disciples claimed
that he had risen from the dead, ascended into heaven, and would soon
come again to establish God’s kingdom on earth. Scholars refer to this
collective expectation of a “second coming” as “apocalyptic”.
These first Jewish Christians were Aramaic-speakers, who formed an
apocalyptic church in Palestine, pooled their economic resources, and
lived in common, waiting for signs of Jesus’s return. Most Jews, however,
lived outside of Palestine in the urban centres of the ancient Mediterra-
nean basin and western Asia. These Jews of the diaspora (dispersal) spoke
Greek, which was the common language for discourse in this ethnic and
cultural melting pot. 18 Early on, the Jewish Christians of Palestine
spread the gospel or “good news” to the diaspora communities. Paul of
Tarsus, a Greek-speaking Jew of the diaspora, a Roman citizen, and an
early Christian convert, carried his conviction in Jesus’s messianic mission
throughout the countries of the eastern Mediterranean. His epistles
10 The Long European Reformation

(letters) are among the oldest Christian texts we have. Paul, who had
never met Jesus, translated Christian faith beyond its initial Jewish
context. He defined Christian ethics, how individuals come to the faith
and how communities of faith should live in this world. He broadcast the
gospel to the Gentiles (non-Jews), and insisted that they did not need to
embrace the complexity of Mosaic law – literally to become Jews – in
order to embrace Jesus. He thus opened Church membership to the
world. Finally he concentrated on the events surrounding Jesus’s death,
the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, as the purpose
of Jesus’s life. Paul saw Jesus as the anointed one, the Messiah (or Christos,
in Greek), whose redeeming death granted salvation for every individual
soul and whose resurrection confirmed the resurrection of all true
believers when Jesus would come again. According to Paul, all that God
required was faith in these truths.
Paul’s historical vision for Christianity would have a profound effect
on the future Church; however, Paul’s personal mission troubled Jewish
Christians, many of whom found it too difficult to embrace Gentile
Christians as brethren. He also angered non-Christian Jews, who became
increasingly enraged over the blasphemous spiritual power which his
followers assigned to Christ, and who regularly persecuted Jewish
Christians. Meanwhile other messiahs spurred popular resistance to
Roman rule; this escalated into a major uprising between 66 and 70 CE.
In retaliation the Romans destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem and brutally
repressed the Palestinian Jews, Christian and non-Christian alike.19
Though Paul had not lived to see it, his vision of the Christian community
separated from its Jewish roots had emerged victorious by default.
In the wake of the great rebellion, many of the first Christian writings
appeared. These gospels offered accounts of Jesus’s life, mission, and
message, for audiences who had never met him. Soon Christian commu-
nities began to develop ceremonies that expressed their faith and
defined membership. They gathered regularly to celebrate the Eucharist,
a ritual meal which recalled the events surrounding Jesus’s death and
resurrection, and over time the feast condensed into a liturgy of com-
munion during which bread and wine were blessed and shared. To join
in Christian communion, a prospective adult convert, or catechumen,
endured a lengthy initiation process culminating in baptism, a ceremo-
nial washing away of the old self with water. Sometimes individuals
broke faith or disrupted the communion among believers. Christians
would forgive these “sins” but only after public acts of confession and
penance by the sinner, normally carried out before the entire community.
 Introduction 11

In some cases unforgiven transgressors were shunned or excommunicated –

denied access to the liturgy of communion.20
The Roman government officially tolerated nearly all religions and
often encouraged integration or syncretism of beliefs to help bind its
culturally diverse empire. 21 Nevertheless, officials expected all citizens
and subjects to honour sanctioned imperial cults. The Jews and Christians
refused to comply, which for the Roman authorities demonstrated dis-
loyalty and fostered disorder. Furthermore, Christian cohesiveness and
their mysterious rituals, which were closed to non-members, aroused
suspicion among neighbours and local authorities. In this atmosphere,
attacks on Christians had official approval and popular support, though
persecution was normally sporadic and local.22
By the second century, Christian communities existed in towns all
over the Roman Empire but were concentrated primarily in the Greek-
speaking East. No Christian possessed a living memory of Jesus, and
without an established leadership the fledgling Church faced a crisis of
authority. In response a group of Christians, calling themselves “Catholic”
(universal) Christians, fashioned an administrative hierarchy that distin-
guished between the laity (the people) and clergy (leaders).23 Initially
the laity probably elected their clergy, but under the emerging Catholic
system the clergy co-opted new leaders. Each Catholic Christian com-
munity was headed by a bishop (from the Greek word episkopos, which
means an “overseer”). Presbyters (elders) and deacons (servants) assisted
him. Though women played key roles among Jesus’s immediate followers
and in the primitive Church, the emerging Catholic leadership was
increasingly limited to males. Catholic Christians argued that the
original bishops had received their authority directly from the apostles,
who had “laid their hands” on their chosen successors, and this “apostolic
succession”, re-enacted in the consecration of each new bishop, justified
episcopal authority in fashioning the norms of faith.24
In their drive to delineate a normative Christianity, Catholic bishops
assembled in synods to discuss divergent interpretations of God’s nature.
They resolved these theological ( from theos = God + logos = “discourse”)
debates with a trinitarian model of three “persons” (perhaps most easily
understood as distinct “personalities”) in one God: the Father, Son
(Christ), and Spirit. Accepting Jesus’s divinity within the Trinity, the
bishops also wrestled with the Christological tension between Jesus as
God and Jesus as man and determined that Jesus possessed both natures.
Finally in their ecclesiology, they defined the Church as clergy-centred
with leadership firmly in episcopal hands.25 The synods drew up brief
12 The Long European Reformation

statements of beliefs, called “creeds”, which all Catholic Christians seeking

communion publicly acknowledged. Those who accepted these creeds
embraced “orthodoxy” (from the Greek, meaning “upright doctrine”).
Choosing to oppose orthodoxy labelled an individual as a “heretic”
(from the Greek word hairesis meaning “choice”). Thus these synods
designed a vocabulary of faith and the machinery for religious conformity.
Ultimately, Catholic Christian bishops consolidated orthodox beliefs
into the “Apostles’ Creed”, separating true believers from dozens of
divergent “heretical” Christian communities. 26 By the year 200 CE, the
Catholic Christians had designated the true, divinely inspired gospels
and epistles as the New Testament, the sanctioned account of Jesus’s life
and mission.
In the third century the Roman Empire weathered an internal crisis
exacerbated by foreign invasions, including the first major incursions by
Germanic tribes. In response, Emperor Diocletian (*284–305 CE) sought
to shore up public order by reinvigorating imperial cults. The unwilling-
ness of Jews and Christians to participate triggered severe persecutions
climaxing in 304–5 CE. Many of the smaller, “heretical”, non-Catholic
Christian communities disappeared, while martyrdom and abjuration
severely weakened Catholic Christianity. After Diocletian retired in 305,
his successors fought among themselves, and the winner, Constantine
(*306–37), attributing his success to the intercession of the Christian
God, legalized Christian worship in 313, offering tax exemptions and
gifts of public properties to Catholic Christians. Finally, in 380, Emperor
Theodosius (*379–95) declared Catholic Christianity the official religion
of the Empire.
Ironically, imperial support and legalization shattered Christian com-
munion. 27 Those who had held their faith during the great persecution
and survived, bitterly refused to re-admit abjured backsliders and were
suspicious of new “fair weather” converts. The crisis stimulated a debate,
with two ecclesiological models advocated: a small, closed spiritual
church of true believers; and a broader open church that would
welcome all. When Catholic Christianity became the official imperial
religion, the open-church model prevailed. Many, who insisted on a
pure church, were labelled as “Donatist” heretics, after Donatus, one of
their outspoken leaders; while others, advocates of a tiny spiritual church,
fled to the desert to pursue a purer, saintly life as monks (solitaries).
As isolated hermetic monks began to attract communities of disciples,
episcopal authorities drew up rules to integrate monasticism into Catholic
Christianity. 28
 Introduction 13

In an effort to resolve the tensions in the rapidly growing legalized

church, Constantine assembled a general or “ecumenical” council of
Church leaders at Nicaea in 325. The council drew up the Nicene Creed,
which refined the tenets of Catholic Christianity and cemented a new
relationship between the Church and Imperial administration. None
the less, despite the rallying power of an official church, the Empire’s
political decline continued, as its governmental structure soon split into
eastern and western halves, each moving along a separate trajectory.
The official Catholic Christian Church also divided between the poorer,
rural, Latin-speaking West and the wealthier, urban, Greek-speaking
East. Shared faith begins with shared language, and differences between
Greek and Latin soon sparked a growing dissonance between the two
communities’ views on theology and church structure. Germanic migra-
tions into the western provinces in the fifth century further alienated
East and West. In the East the bishops continued to function under the
guidance of the Emperor at Constantinople. In the West the imperial
system collapsed, and bishops assumed the mantle of political leadership
over Imperial administrative districts, known since Diocletian’s rule as
dioceses. The bishops of Rome, asserting apostolic succession from Peter
and controlling the capital of the old Empire, eventually claimed sym-
bolic authority as father, papa, over other Latin-speaking bishops. Though
few initially honoured this title, no other Latin churchman could approach
the spiritual prestige of Rome’s bishop.29
As classical civilization began to disintegrate around them, the intel-
lectual elite sought to preserve key pieces of the old culture and to influ-
ence the development of the new. Jerome of Aquileia (c.342–420)
translated the Greek Bible into a Latin Vulgate edition which would be
the standard throughout the Middle Ages. Meanwhile the African
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) produced a mass of polemical religious
writings that would be as prominent as the works of Paul of Tarsus in
Latin Christian thought. In his youth Augustine had embraced the
Manichaean faith, a dualist Persian religion. Manichaeans believed in
two Gods: a holy God, Father of All, who ruled the realm of the spirit;
and an evil God, Satan or Lucifer, who created and ruled the world.
Under Manichaean Christology, Jesus Christ was the Son of the holy
God, who “appeared” to take on human form to suppress Satan’s power.
Manichaean dualism extended to human beings, who also possessed two
natures: the body (evil) and soul (good). Special knowledge, Gnosis,
gained through a rigorous ascetic self-discipline, allowed the soul to
control bodily appetites and so find union with the Father of All.
14 The Long European Reformation

When Augustine converted, he brought with him much of his Gnostic

Manichaean world view. 30
Augustine believed that the carnal (bodily) union of our parents stained
our souls with original sin, a legacy extending back to the first sexual
union of Adam and Eve. Baptism washed away the sin, but did not
change our sinful bodily natures. Using the imagery of light, Augustine
argued that blinded by our own self-will we grope around in the dark-
ness believing that we are free. Yet only when God offers the “gift” of
divine favour (grace), can we freely pursue the spiritual good. Though
he persecuted Donatists, Augustine himself envisioned a small assembly
of true spiritual believers, enlightened by God, as the true Church. Late
in his life he followed his own logic to the conclusion that God the Father
had predestined some to be saved and some to be damned. 31 Augustine’s
views on sin and grace would have a profound effect on later Christian
thought, particularly among the sixteenth-century reformers.
As the ancient Roman world continued to disintegrate in the West,
individuals such as Benedict of Nursia (c.480–c.550) in Italy founded
monasteries, communities of monks, whose rules included the dutiful
copying of ancient manuscripts. Because of the Benedictines’ efforts,
critical writings of ancient pagan and Christian scholars survived. As
time passed, however, the cultural environment that had produced the
original works faded from memory, and the writings took on a monolithic
character as enshrined sacred texts. The books of the New Testament
and the Fathers of the Church, like Augustine, spoke with an authority
no later writer could muster.

Medieval Christendom: Christian Empire and Papal Monarchy

In the centuries between the deposition of the last western Emperor in

476 and the outbreak of plague in 1348, Latin Christianity underwent
a number of changes. The sixteenth-century reformers argued that
medieval Christianity had mutated from its original form, and they
unfavourably juxtaposed medieval innovations against the word of God
embodied in the New Testament, the records of the primitive Church,
and the writings of the Church Fathers. Developments in medieval
Christianity did affect the practices of faith and the Church’s structure in
several ways: first by germanizing classical Christian beliefs; secondly by
formalizing the schism between the Latin and Greek churches; thirdly
by militarizing religious self-defence during the Crusades; fourthly
 Introduction 15

by galvanizing Church and state under the rubric of Christendom; and

finally by institutionalizing the religious authority of the popes in the
form of a papal monarchy. Before moving to the body of the text, let us
briefly examine these five developments.

The Germanization of Christianity

The Germanic tribes poured into the Western Empire in the fourth and
fifth centuries as both invited and uninvited guests, settling in among
their Latin neighbours. Several German tribes entered Imperial terri-
tory as Christians, though they followed a heretical form known as
Arianism, which did not accept the full divinity of Jesus or the Holy
Spirit. Arian Christian warlords harassed and persecuted Catholic
Christians. Other tribes, such as the Angles, Saxons, and Franks, came
into the Empire as pagans and soon Catholic Christian missionaries
sought to convert them. German tribal leaders, known as kings, embodied
the “luck” of the tribe and possessed sacral characteristics, so missionaries
devoted their efforts to converting kings, such as the Frankish leader
Clovis, who in 496 accepted Catholic Christianity along with his whole
tribe. The dramatic conversion and baptism of several thousand
Frankish warriors in one day, however, was only the first step in the
complex process of Christianizing Germanic beliefs, attitudes, values,
and behaviours. 32
In order to make the new faith understandable to the converts,
Christian missionaries recast it in German cultural terms, accepting
Germanic political ideals and integrating aspects of Germanic folk
religions. For example, the kings claimed ultimate ownership of all lands
controlled by the tribe and cemented the loyalty of their retainers,
including churchmen, with gifts of land or precious metal, referred to
in the sources as benefices. Royal generosity entailed obligations from
the recipient, and “beneficed” churchmen became beholden to their lay
patrons. Likewise the German common folk, whose religiosity centred
on rituals that placated or manipulated forces in the physical and spiritual
world, accepted Christianity as a new and powerful set of ceremonies
and magical objects. Germanic moral or ethical responsibilities, however,
remained embedded in kinship obligations of honour and vengeance,
and the ethical fabric of classical Christianity carried little meaning.
Conflicts between the ethical expectations of kinship and of faith would
continue into the early modern era.
16 The Long European Reformation

The schism between Latin and Greek Christianity

As Latin Christianity became more German, relations with the Greek-

speaking Christians deteriorated. Ruled by the Emperor from Con-
stantinople, the medieval Eastern Roman Empire became known as
Byzantium. Here urban life, Imperial administration, and ancient reli-
gious culture survived. The emperors acted as head of both Church
and state in a system referred to by historians as Caesaro-papism. 33 Never-
theless, what became known as the Greek Orthodox Church was
never fully subservient to Imperial will. In key urban centres such as
Alexandria, bishops claimed the title of patriarch, and exercised signifi-
cant authority in religious affairs. Furthermore, monastic communities
also operated as independent power-brokers, whose religious artefacts
(icons) attracted widespread devotion among the faithful. Down to the
ninth century, the Byzantine emperors convened ecumenical councils
to address the endemic religious debates which plagued Greek Orthodox
Christianity. The Orthodox patriarchs normally invited the pope to
the councils, but they treated papal officials as poor cousins, whose
claim to special authority was laughable. Under Emperor Justinian
(*527–65) Byzantine forces attempted to reconquer Italy from the
Germanic Ostrogoths, but he could only secure the southern half of the
peninsula.
Beginning in 632, Islamic armies from the Arabian peninsula swept
through Syria, Palestine, and North Africa depriving the Byzantine
emperors of their richest provinces and the Orthodox Church of its
leading patriarchs. Prior to 750 the popes had formally recognized the
Emperor’s authority in southern Italy; but as Byzantine influence waned,
the popes turned to the Germanic Frankish Catholic kings as military
and political partners. This Frankish–Papal alliance alienated the popes
from the Byzantine Church and state.34 For centuries Latin and Greek
Christians had practised and understood their faith differently; political
will and the memory of empire alone had held them together. By the
end of the eighth century, however, the Empire was in shambles, and
the will to cooperate had dissolved. The two churches went their own
way until the mid-eleventh century when the papacy, in the throes of
internal reform, again claimed full authority in all spiritual matters. In
1054, papal officials declared the patriarch of Constantinople a heretic
and broke communion with him. Henceforth popes would dream of
ending the schism and reuniting the two churches on papal terms, but the
division endured and still endures.
 Introduction 17

The growth of Islam and the Crusading ideal

The dynamic spread of Islam following the death of the Prophet

Mohammed in 632 was shockingly quick and extensive. By 711, Muslim
armies had conquered an empire that stretched from central Asia to the
Atlantic coast of Africa. They also controlled a number of ports on
Europe’s Mediterranean coastline, and most of the Iberian peninsula.
The medieval Islamic empire produced a rich and sophisticated urban
culture sustained by an elaborate trading network and religious toleration
for Jews and Christians.35 For our purposes, the Muslim presence created
a formidable and alien enemy against whom Christianized Germanic
warriors would direct their bellicose energies. In 732, Charles Martel,
a Frankish warlord, defeated a Muslim raiding party at Tours in France,
which earned him papal accolades as “defender of the faith”. Soon the
remnants of Christian kingdoms in northern Spain began an inexorable
“holy war”, the Reconquista, against their Muslim neighbours, which con-
tinued until 1492. The volatile mixture of faith and violence, epitomized
by orders of warrior monks such as the Knights Templar, directed
against an imagined dehumanized Islamic enemy, later characterized
the Crusades, which began under the auspices of the reformed papacy
in 1096. When the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem in 1099, they slaughtered
every inhabitant in the city. For a time the Christian warriors were suc-
cessful, but they eventually lost their edge, as Muslim counter-offensives
regained the Holy Land.36 By the thirteenth century, the crusading ideal
itself had changed as popes invoked crusades against heretical Albigen-
sians in southern France and political enemies on the Italian peninsula.37
All in all the crusading spirit reflected a mix of piety and militancy that
pervaded Christianity from the Middle Ages into the early modern era.

Christendom imagined: the Frankish–Papal alliance

The popes could draw warriors from all over Europe to participate in
the Crusades by invoking the ideal of “Christendom”, which had its roots
in the Germanization of Christianity and in particular the Frankish–
Papal alliance.38 Since Clovis’s conversion ecclesiastical officials had
depended on his successors, the Merovingians, to defeat Arian and pagan
rivals. Merovingian victories expanded the Frankish domain, but the
dynasty followed the Germanic practice of divisible inheritance, resulting
in fratricide and factional warfare. The kings relied on powerful warlords,
18 The Long European Reformation

headed by the maior domus, who was steward of the royal household, to
rule effectively. Charles Martel held this title and in 732 brought prestige
to his own family with his victory over the Muslims. 39 His son Pippin
planned to depose the Merovingians but had no legitimate claim to sacral
kingship. In 751, Pope Zacharias justified Pippin’s coup with an archival
forgery, the Donation of Constantine, which claimed to grant the pope
the right to make and unmake kings.40 Three years later when Zacharias’s
successor, Stephen III, requested assistance against his troublesome
neighbours the Lombards, Pippin marched into Italy and subdued them.
Pippin then cemented his compact with the popes through a benefice of
land in central Italy, which became the core of papal territories in the
peninsula.
The new Frankish dynasty, known in history as the Carolingians after
Charlemagne, their most famous member, initiated a reform movement
within the Church that established a template for ecclesiastical adminis-
tration that lasted until the Reformation. Under the leadership of the
Anglo-Saxon churchmen Boniface and Alcuin, the Carolingians ordered
the construction of parish churches in the countryside, assigned priests
trained to carry out sacramental duties in the parishes, and assessed
a tithe, a tax of one-tenth on the parishioners’ harvests, to support the
local clergyman in his duties. 41 Boniface also sent missionaries eastward
into Central Europe with the Carolingian armies to convert the defeated
pagan tribes, often at sword point. As they had with the popes, the
Carolingians granted to monasteries and bishops lands and rights along
this religious and military frontier, establishing a powerful landed clerical
elite in Central Europe.
As their domains grew, the Carolingians became increasingly dependent
on the clergy to handle correspondence and record-keeping as traditional
Germanic face-to-face administration became too difficult. The clerical
advisors identified the expanding Carolingian Empire as the imperium
christianum (Christendom), a concept they drew from Augustine of Hippo’s
City of God. Christendom fused Church and state and blended membership
in both. Baptism made one both a Frank and a Christian, and forced
conversions were essential for submission to Carolingian overlordship.
Finally, on Christmas day 800, the pope crowned Charlemagne as
Emperor of the Romans and chief Christian layman. Ultimately, Frankish
Christendom failed to hold together and by the mid-ninth century
the Carolingian Empire had collapsed. None the less, the concept of
Christendom would take on new life under the auspices of a reforming
papacy in the eleventh century.
 Introduction 19

Papal monarchy

The Carolingian political system disintegrated as a result of internal

friction and external threats from Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims. Polit-
ical authority soon devolved as peasants and towns folk turned to local
warlords and their fortified castles for protection. In return the lords
demanded labour service in their fields, which bound the peasants as
serfs to the noble manors in a system historians have traditionally referred
to as “feudalism”. 42 In time, some lords amassed regional power-bases
and assumed control over local ecclesiastical institutions, as Church bene-
fices became personal possessions (Eigenkirchensystem). Bishops and
abbots often fought side by side with their lay kinsmen and acted as feu-
dal lords in their own right. 43 Lay appropriation of ecclesiastical
appointments extended to Rome where magnate clans fought among
themselves over the papacy and several pontificates ended in assassin-
ations. In 955, Otto I, king of Germany, defeated the Magyar invaders
and consolidated his authority over much of Central Europe. In 962,
Pope John XII, hoping to forge an alliance against his rivals, offered
Otto the Imperial crown in Rome. Otto, who had built his power in Ger-
many by substituting royal patronage for local lay patronage over eccle-
siastical benefices, sought to reform the papacy along the same lines and
deposed John when he resisted. This act initiated a century of imperial
involvement in papal affairs.
In the tenth century there were also signs of revival within the
Church. Monastic communities, spearheaded by Cluny in Burgundy,
reinstated the strict Benedictine rule. In order to minimalize lay influ-
ence in monastic affairs, the houses placed themselves under the protec-
tion of St Peter in the guise of his vicar (representative) on earth, the
pope. The Cluniac reform movement nurtured a cohort of monks who
were filled with zeal to revive the clergy as a distinct order and to separate
the Church from local lay interference. 44 With this initial conservative
agenda, the reform movement appeared as an ally to the German
emperors; and in the mid-eleventh century, Henry III sought assistance
from Cluny to undermine the Roman magnates’ ongoing influence over
papal affairs. Beginning with the pontificate of Leo IX (*1048–56), the
reformers pushed for clerical celibacy and an end to the practice of
simony – the purchase of ecclesiastical office – which contemporaries
associated with lay control over clerical appointments. Leo and his
successors also reorganized staffing for Rome’s civic churches, whose
benefice holders, the cardinals, traditionally came from local magnate
20 The Long European Reformation

families. The popes installed new cardinals drawn from a circle of Cluniac
reformers and called on their expertise to help administer the Church.
In 1056, Emperor Henry III’s untimely death left the six-year-old
Henry IV as heir. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II (*1058–61) decreed that
henceforth the college of cardinals would elect the pope, thus ending
the Emperor’s influence over the reform movement. As the next step,
the popes completed their campaign against lay influence over clerical
appointments by claiming the sole right to ritually install (invest) abbots
and bishops throughout Christendom. By 1076, Pope Gregory VII
(*1073–85) would clash with the now mature Henry IV over the investiture
of the archbishop of Milan. In the ensuing conflict, Gregory excommu-
nicated the Emperor and initially compelled Henry to submit, but the
Investiture Controversy dragged on until the Concordat of Worms in
1122, which permitted nomination by those, including lay persons, who
had rights over the benefice, while insisting on formal papal approval
(provision) of the nominee.45 The emperors had initiated reform within
the Church, but the reformed papacy now claimed full authority over
the Church and spiritual headship over all of Christendom.
The “Gregorian” reforms in the mid-eleventh century ushered in two
centuries of expanding papal authority and power, culminating in the
pontificate of Innocent III (*1198–1216). The popes refashioned them-
selves from vicars of St Peter to vicars of Christ, thus claiming to represent
God on earth. Exercising their new authority, beginning in 1123 the popes
called a series of ecumenical councils, without Greek participation, to
spell out papal primacy in spiritual affairs. Furthermore, benefitting
from imagined ties to the old Roman Empire embodied in the forged
Donation of Constantine, papal officials followed Roman traditions that
designated the ruler as the creator and guardian of the law. Roman law
was written law, and papal lawyers compiled lists of decretals and canon
laws promulgated by the popes before the councils, which defined
proper practices in all aspects of Christian life. The popes dispatched
legates (representatives) to various principalities, and the papal court
became the seat of justice for disputes within Christendom. 46 In the pro-
cess, the popes constructed a system of administration, prerogatives, and
precedence that allowed them to exercise authority over the Christian
clergy comparable to the power of any monarch over his or her subjects.
The papal monarchy, like other medieval lay monarchies, was a hier-
archical network of persons who owed ultimate loyalty and obedience to
their monarch, the pope. Like other monarchs the popes claimed the
right to appoint their subjects to important governmental posts such as
 Introduction 21

bishoprics and abbacies, through papal provision, as well as the right to

tax them and judge their transgressions. Unlike that of lay monarchs,
whose authority over their subjects applied within a relatively coherent
territorial block, papal power extended over influential and socially prom-
inent individuals throughout Europe. Conflicts over the personal alle-
giances of powerful churchmen in England, France, and especially the
territories subject to the Holy Roman Emperors of the German Nation
would often sour medieval Church–state relations, but by 1300 the
papacy’s role as head of Christendom seemed unassailable.

The early modern reformers looked backward through Church history to

determine the pure form of religion and Christian community they
hoped to realize. Inevitably they would read the Bible in light of their
own experiences, with the confidence that the Holy Spirit would guide
them. The medieval Church had imagined its own reforms as true to the
apostolic Church and informed by the Spirit, yet as in the fourteenth-
century artworks, the imagined apostles wore contemporary clothing.
While claiming affiliation with the old, any reformed church would be
new and different. The Christian community had evolved from a tiny
group of Jewish believers at odds with society to a rich and powerful
institution integrally engaged in a system of social power that its ecclesi-
astical institutions and moral guidelines sustained. To reform such a
structure would be unthinkable unless society itself faced a profound crisis.
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 Part I
THE WARP: THREADS OF
REFORMATION HISTORIES,
1350–1650
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 1
THE LATE MEDIEVAL CRISIS,
1348–1517

During the four centuries covered in this study, Europeans lived under
the murderous shadow of the plague. Between 1347 and 1350, an epi-
demic, later known as the Black Death, swept through Europe and killed
perhaps one-third of its population. Imagine the effects of the frightening
and unexplainable deaths of nearly two billion people in the course of
two summers. The pervasiveness and scope of misery left the fourteenth-
century chroniclers seeking moral explanations in human sinfulness and
divine retribution. Long processions of penitent flagellants passed from
community to community whipping themselves in hope of appeasing
God’s wrath and warding off plague through their expiation. Townsfolk
blamed resident Jews for poisoning wells, even though they too were
dying. Christian mobs murdered entire Jewish communities and burned
their homes, yet the plague continued to rage. One could imagine, along
with John of Winterthur, a Swiss Franciscan, that the Apocalypse prom-
ised in the Bible had begun. 1
The European world didn’t end in 1350, but it changed dramatically.
Plague is a complex disease whose dissemination requires the presence
of bacteria, fleas, and rodents. Endemic forms of plague exist in reservoirs
among rodent populations throughout the world. Occasionally an epi-
zootic disease among the rodents forces the plague-carrying fleas to find
other hosts, including humans. Once plague has entered the human
population, it spreads inexorably in great pandemics, series of cyclical
epidemics covering vast areas, that can last several centuries. 2 In Chris-
tendom the Black Death began in the ports of southern Italy and spread
like a slow but relentless brush fire across Europe. News of the calamity
preceded the outbreak of the illness itself, and religious officials called
for special services to ward off the catastrophe. Yet inevitably the disease

25
26 Threads of Reformation Histories

came, for as the Florentine humanist Boccaccio noted, “all the wisdom
and ingenuity of man were unavailing” to prevent it. 3 The initial out-
break struck rich and poor, clergy and laity, townsfolk and peasants.
The epidemic’s pathology left the survivors in shock yet relieved that
God had relented in his punishment; but the disease, which was now
endemic among the rat and flea populations in Europe, reappeared in
the early 1360s. This second deadly assault of plague had a profound
psychological and cultural impact whose effects were as devastating as
the Black Death.4 With the plague as a recurrent nightmare that would
haunt Europe until 1721, late fourteenth-century Christendom faced a
crisis marked by demographic stagnation, economic depression, endemic
warfare, and schism within the Catholic Church itself.

The Late Medieval Crisis

Scholars have traced the roots of the late medieval crisis to conditions
prior to the plague, when Europe was overpopulated, malnourished,
and under-employed. Between 1000 and 1300 CE, the population had
grown rapidly, and by the fourteenth century, perhaps 75 to 80 million
people inhabited the continent. Given available agricultural technolo-
gies, Europe was “full”, and many regions sheltered more inhabitants
than they would at any time prior to the nineteenth century.5 In the early
Middle Ages, Europeans had lived in isolated settlements surrounded by
dense and often intractable forests. Beginning in the eleventh century, the
growing population cleared forests and drained marshlands, bringing
new land under cultivation. By 1300, from nearly any steeple top in
Western Europe, an observer could see church towers in all directions,
each marking a settlement. The forests remained, but as grazing lands
for domesticated pigs and as sources of lumber and firewood.
Most Europeans lived in villages and worked the land. As we have
seen, when the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, the elites, both those
who prayed and those who fought, asserted rights over the land, which
they divided into manors.6 Under the manorial system, the peasants
(serfs) owed labour obligations on the lord’s demesne in return for the
physical and spiritual protection which the warriors and monks provided.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries many lay and ecclesiastical
lords moved away from direct management of their estates and leased
out farms to peasant tenants. The former serfs commuted their labour
duties to fixed payments in coin or kind and so gained some autonomy;
 The Late Medieval Crisis 27

however, the emerging system of codified laws reinforced seignorial

legal rights over the supposedly “free” peasants. Lords now collected fees
for the use of manorial mills and ovens, for authorizing marriages, or for
permitting a son to inherit a tenancy from his father. This new, more
flexible form of feudal lordship allowed lords to rachet up demands in
response to changing market conditions.
The system was exploitative, but the peasants were not simply hapless
and passive victims. They treated the fields they worked as their own
land, and the law awarded them some rights as tenants. Possession of
a plough and team of oxen or horses elevated wealthier peasant house-
holders to positions as village leaders, and in some villages all principal
householders purchased citizenship and exercised communal rights.7
Over much of Europe, peasant communes evolved as political agents in
local life. Peasants also participated in market activities. As the population
grew, grain prices rose, and many tenants benefitted from the increased
value of their yields in relation to contractually fixed quit-rent owed on
their lands. As a result, peasant communities became increasingly strati-
fied with their own internal social and economic tensions, yet the funda-
mental social gulf remained the distance between those who worked and
those who, under the guise of lordship including ecclesiastical officials,
benefitted from the fruits of the working peasantry. 8
In the wake of increased population and prosperity, some villages and
market centres evolved into towns, which received charters and privileges
from the king or regional prince. Towns existed everywhere in Europe,
but they especially clustered in dense commercial networks in northern
Italy and the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Nether-
lands). 9 Traditionally scholars have juxtaposed the freer air of medieval
towns against the servile rural world that encompassed them. According
to this model, the peasants lived out their days constrained by limited
technology and clouded by ignorance, while the walls that separated
medieval towns from rural backwardness enclosed a free and politically
active populace engaged in manufacturing and trade. Recent research,
however, has shown that this dichotomy between town and country
simply distorts historical conditions. Medieval towns emerged primarily
to accumulate and distribute agricultural surpluses. Gradually these
“peasant markets” erected walls and became permanent centres of both
trade and handicraft production in household workshops. Most central
markets exchanged food and manufactures in limited regional networks.
Some cities, such as Florence or Augsburg, however, sheltered thousands
of workers devoted to cloth production, and a merchant elite with agents
28 Threads of Reformation Histories

in distant cities and customers who included royalty; yet even these
manufacturing centres retained their ties to the regional agricultural
economy. Town walls never circumscribed economic zones, for as many
as one-fifth of urban residents engaged in part-time agricultural work,
while rural craft production probably contributed as much to the volume
of manufactured goods as urban workshops.
Towns were in fact embedded in “feudal” society. Urban ecclesiastical
institutions, lay elites, and even the civic government itself held rights of
lordship over neighbouring villages and peasants. Powerful extended
families with ties to the regional nobility and expertise in long-distance
commerce formed the urban elite.10 Beneath them tradesmen and labour-
ers organized themselves into guilds to regulate production, exchange,
and wages. This urban middle class divided itself along strata of wealth and
professional prestige. By modern standards European towns were small
with only Paris sheltering in excess of 100,000 residents. On the whole,
perhaps 10 percent of the population lived in towns, yet the concentration
of wealth, political power, and education in urban settings gave towns
much greater significance than their demographic weight warranted.11
By the end of the thirteenth century, Europe’s growing population had
reached a demographic ceiling. Despite improvements in agricultural
technologies, in particular the shift from a two- to a three-field system,
which increased the percentage of cropland under cultivation, the land
could no longer feed everyone. Rural parents found it difficult to
provide a livable legacy for their children. Forms of inheritance which
favoured one child, such as primogeniture for the eldest son, or ultimo-
geniture for the youngest, left other siblings with few resources beyond
their labour. Divisible inheritance turned livable holdings of fifteen to
twenty acres into micro-plots which could not support families. The sur-
plus of labour reduced wages, while grain shortages produced steadily
rising prices. As the climate grew cooler and wetter after 1300, frosts and
heavy rains triggered famine in much of north-western Europe between
1315 and 1317, which may have carried off 10 to 15 per cent of the
population. The ensuing generation filled in the gaps, but dearth and
hunger had become the norm for the vast majority of Europeans. 12
When plague struck in 1348, it reduced the human pressure on
resources, but it also strained familial, social, economic, and political rela-
tions. Soon institutional structures, inheritance patterns, systems of trade,
and even the lord’s ability to control the peasantry, came under stress
because, in Western Europe at least, feudal social foundations assumed
a large population and limited resources. The initial redistribution
 The Late Medieval Crisis 29

of wealth profited peasants, whose rents for tenancies fell, and skilled
artisans, whose wages rose, as the late fourteenth century formed something
of a “golden age” for commoners with more disposable income,
available land, and political leverage than their ancestors or descendants.
The initial social and economic burden of depopulation fell on lay
and ecclesiastical lords, who responded by freezing wages at pre-plague
levels and preventing tenants from moving to estates with better lease
rates for land, but these measures failed.13 As time passed, however, condi-
tions for peasants began to deteriorate. Depopulation had altered traditional
patterns of demand for market-oriented agriculture. Ironically, a series
of good harvests in the last quarter of the fourteenth century triggered
a prolonged slump in prices, which temporarily enriched the pur-
chasing power of wage labourers but ruined those drawing income
from farming. Peasants abandoned their fields and homes, while mar-
ginal soils reverted to pasture and woodland. In the German-speaking
lands, perhaps a quarter of all villages ceased to exist.14 In northern France
and other turbulent regions, marauding armies drove the peasants out,
but war and plague alone cannot adequately explain these abandonments.15
Farming had grown unprofitable for many, and people quit to find better
work.
The economic strains affected more than the poor alone. Ecclesiastical
and lay landlords continued to feel the pinch as rent revenues from their
tenancies shrivelled up, for the tenant farmers could not afford the old
rates. Historians have argued that this crisis in revenues drove some lords
to banditry and helps explain the endemic civil wars in fifteenth-century
England, France, and elsewhere. Some impecunious lords mortgaged
their holdings and rights, handing them over to civic governments or
wealthy individual townsmen. The ploughmen, who had formerly been
the social and economic backbone of the peasantry, also fell into debt to
urban moneylenders and Jews. Peasants continued to work small to
medium-sized plots of land, but the towns assumed increasing control over
rural production and peasant labour, which exacerbated town–country
antagonisms. 16 None the less, growing urban economic clout did not
necessarily spell prosperity for all town dwellers. In many European cit-
ies, artisan householders lost their economic cushion and merged into
the growing ranks of working poor, while wealthy guildsmen who had
profited in the decades of crisis distanced themselves from their poorer
neighbours and intermarried with older elite families. Civic governance
became the prerogative of a small circle of oligarchs who saw themselves
as rulers maintaining good order among their “subjects”.
30 Threads of Reformation Histories

Good order and public peace were at a premium all over Europe in
the fifteenth century. The kings of England and France had warred with
one another for most of the Middle Ages, primarily over the English
monarch’s extensive territorial holdings in France. In 1337 rival claims
over Gascony, Aquitaine, and Flanders initiated conflict between the
French Valois monarchs and Edward III of England which plunged
France into a devastating century of bloodshed. As the Hundred Years
War drew to a close, frustration among English nobles over losses in
France and the ineptitude of Henry VI touched off a power struggle in
1455, known as the War of the Roses, which divided the nobility and
weakened the once proud English monarchy. In fifteenth-century Italy
most of the great city republics fell into the hands of noble despots or
ambitious mercenary captains, whose legacy of violence and duplicity
would inspire Machiavelli’s model of a successful prince. In the German-
speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, dynastic struggles among
the dukes of Bavaria, Luxembourg, and Austria over the Imperial
throne combined with the expansionist policies of the dukes of Bur-
gundy in the Rhine valley to disrupt peace and trade. Stronger states
would eventually emerge from these struggles, but the wars’ immediate
impact was to weaken established authorities and undermine traditional
loyalties.
Late medieval states functioned through networks of aristocratic
families bound together by personal ties rather than through institu-
tional structures. Royal councils, central and regional law courts, and
fiscal chambers provided the skeleton of a state, but the human muscle
that moved it responded to other stimuli than modern bureaucrats.
Politics entailed a welding of private interest onto royal service. Officials
treated their posts as personal property, allocated to them as members
of a distinct and privileged class. They governed through a distribution
of favours, both personal and official, and by calling in debts and obliga-
tions from clients. Devotion to a superior and generosity to subordinates
were honourable and ethical traits. The members of this power elite
envisioned themselves as the community of the realm, and they jealously
defended the “public” interest, which meant their collective private
rights. By the late fourteenth century nearly all leading ecclesiastical
officials belonged to the ruling class by birth or ambition, and ties of
blood, patronage, and class interest remained strong. Clerical education
was a traditional pathway to governmental service, except in Italy where
a new cohort of university-trained laymen, who modelled their political
behaviour on ancient pagan statesmen such as Cicero, had emerged.
 The Late Medieval Crisis 31

Over time, lay officials would gradually replace churchmen in royal

councils everywhere. 17
Throughout the Middle Ages, two theories justified political legitimacy.
The first, hierarchical and rooted in Roman imperial law, saw authority
descending from God through the pope, emperor, or king downward.
The second, communal and rooted in Germanic conventions, grounded
authority in mutual oaths sworn among relative equals. Both models
spelled out a code of conduct for their adherents, though neither accur-
ately depicted political reality. Communal assemblies generated hier-
archies, and royal charters called on the community of the realm as often
as on divine authority. The papacy, as self-conscious heir to imperial
Rome, had nurtured the hierarchical model throughout the Middle
Ages, but communal values legitimated the activities of many religious
groups such as monasteries, parishes, and confraternities. Since the
Gregorian reforms, lay rulers had struggled with popes and with the
clerical elite within their territories over jurisdictional and property
rights, with both king and pope asserting direct authority from God. As
we have seen, in building the medieval papal monarchy, the popes had
fashioned a centralized judicial and fiscal system that claimed authority
over Europe’s entire clerical population. As lay monarchical states grew
and began to define their legitimacy on the basis of “national” myths,
clerical leaders all over Europe faced difficult choices over whom they
should serve. This clash of patronage, private interests, and loyalties
would come to a head in the fourteenth century.

The Late Medieval Church

The image of Christendom, first articulated during the Carolingian era,

informed religious and political discourse into the fourteenth century.
In 1350 most Europeans recognized one spiritual leader, the pope, and
this must be seen as the greatest achievement of the medieval Church.
Only a few European regions lay outside of Christendom. In the south-
east, the Balkan territories of the Byzantine Empire followed the Greek
Orthodox Christian Church, whose spiritual and political leaders refused
to recognize papal authority. In eastern Europe, Muscovite Russia also
honoured Orthodox Christianity. In 1386 the conversion of the Grand
Prince of Lithuania and his subjects to Catholic Christianity stretched
the eastern frontier of Christendom to Kiev, where it would remain.
Finally, in southern Spain, Granada formed the last remnant of the once
32 Threads of Reformation Histories

great Moslem emirate of al-Andalus. Otherwise Catholic Christianity

predominated, though pocket Jewish communities persevered under
the shadow of extortionate protection fees demanded by political author-
ities and threats of collective violence from Christian neighbours.
In the broadest sense the late medieval Church encompassed all
baptized Christians who recognized the pope as their earthly head, but
for our purposes we will focus on the visible institutional structure, out-
side of which, according to Pope Boniface VIII, there was “no salvation
or remission of sins”. 18 Salvation for the Christian came first from bap-
tism, a sacrament or ritual act involving water, oil, and prayers, which in
Augustine of Hippo’s imagery washed away original sin. Following the
Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, once a Christian reached spiritual
adulthood, canon law required at least an annual confession of sins to
a priest, followed by reception of the Eucharist – bread, consecrated
through rituals performed by a priest, that miraculously became the
body of Christ. These two sacraments sustained a Christian in grace,
literally a spiritual “gift” from God brought on by the salvation of Jesus
Christ, which allowed a Christian full communion with God in heaven
after death. Finally, the sacrament of extreme unction offered a last
confession of sins, with prayers and anointing, which prepared the
shriven soul of the dying Christian for judgement before God. 19 These
sacradotal (grace-giving) acts were essential for salvation, and all of
them, except baptism on rare life-threatening occasions, required a man
sacramentally anointed into the priesthood to perform them. Among
its members the late medieval clergy counted nuns, monks, hermits,
administrators, and schoolboys; but the fundamental cleric was a priest
responsible for the cure (care) of souls, who performed sacerdotal rituals.
Most Christians received the crucial sacraments as members of a parish
community, from their parish curate.
The parish (parochia) system had slowly evolved since its Carolingian
foundation, and as with so many other medieval institutions it had
acquired multiple functions. At its core was a “mother” church with full
rights to baptize all parishioners. Since 1215 every Christian belonged to
a parish, and the invisible lines of parish boundaries portioned out the
landscape of Christendom. Not all churches had parochial status, and
many parishes, particularly in England and Italy, included filial churches,
with some sacramental rights, along with chapels, chantries, or other
sacral sites. The medieval demographic growth had resulted in the foun-
dation of frontier parishes and the subdivision of older parochial units,
but the process was never systematic, so tensions among parishioners
 The Late Medieval Crisis 33

between the rights of the mother church and newer sacral centres, rein-
forced by communal disputes over other resources, often soured paro-
chial relations.
The parish church itself normally comprised a choir or sanctuary,
where the priest performed his sacerdotal functions, and the nave,
where the faithful gathered to observe and hear the priest. Though local
lords, as patrons, might claim the right to attend religious services in the
sanctuary and often to be buried there, a railing or screen topped by
a crucifix (rood) divided the church’s two parts, visibly distinguishing
clerical space from that allocated to the laity. Painted or carved images of
Christ, Mary, and the saints covered the nave walls as teaching devices.
Some churches sheltered side altars, called chantries, for endowed com-
memorative Masses for the dead. The bells in the tower attached to the
church were rung to summon parishioners to services, sound the hours
of the ritual day, honour the dead, warn the community of fires and
threats, and ward off storms. Finally the walled yard around the church
sheltered the cemetery, offered defensive protection for the living in
border regions, and sometimes provided space for plays, celebrations,
and church ales. Ecclesiastical law required all parishioners to attend
parish services on Sundays and feast days. The people also came to
receive the sacraments and to be buried. Religious sites covered the
landscape, but the parish church was the nerve centre for collective
spiritual life.
To maintain the building and the ritual objects associated with the
sacraments and to sustain the curate with food and lodging, the
community paid annual tithes, normally assessed at one-tenth of their
crops. Parishioners sometimes delivered the grain, fruits, and eggs to
the parsonage for storage in its barn or larder, but normally officials
representing the tithe-holders collected the fruits directly at harvest.
As with so many other aspects of feudal administration, tithe revenues,
known as “temporalities”, actually belonged to the patron, who reserved
the right to appoint a priest as curate. Patrons were often church officials
or monastic houses, but lay men and women sometimes held the right of
patronage as descendants of the original parish founder or by acquisition
of the rights through mortgage or sale. The system could become quite
complex, with patronage rights and tithe revenues belonging to separate
individuals or in some cases shareholders. Those who pocketed tithe
revenues had responsibility for maintaining the sanctuary and sustaining
the priest, but the alienation of tithe collecting from religious service
opened the door for all sorts of irregularities as many patrons treated
34 Threads of Reformation Histories

their rights as a source of revenue and were less than conscientious about
making repairs or choosing priests. Patrons would grant their benefice
to a clerical relative or promising university student, who in turn would
use part of the income to hire a “mass-priest” as vicar. Absenteeism
among benefice-holders was not uncommon, and pluralism (the holding
of more than one benefice) was also widespread.
Lay interest and demand favoured resident priests, who could
effectively perform the sacraments and other religious services (called
“sacramentals”) such as blessing crops and livestock, and despite absen-
teeism and pluralism most parishes had resident beneficed clergy. To
cover for revenues skimmed off by patrons, parish priests often charged
fees for services, to the frustration of their tithe-paying parishioners.
Communities with chapels or filial churches paid tithes to the mother
church, whose curate was supposed to visit the outlying sites for bi-weekly
or monthly services and, most importantly, to attend the sick and dying
to prepare their souls for the next world. Distance, age, and temperament
sometimes resulted in irregular contact between the curate and these
outlying communities. Village officials routinely petitioned to elevate
their chapel or filial church to parochial status. Meanwhile a proletariat
of unbeneficed priests celebrated commemorative Masses for the souls
of dead parishioners at chapels and chantries financed by their surviving
kin. 20 Overall the extractive nature of the tithe system created tension
between supply and demand for religious services, and the misappro-
priation of revenues made many under-compensated clergymen fee
conscious. The laity responded by criticizing the tithe system and by
seeking to gain greater control over parochial revenues. Over the
centuries, community members had provided additional gifts to support
parochial activities, and the accumulated capital formed the church
fabric. In the later Middle Ages local lay parish members known as
church wardens assumed responsibility for the fabric.
While the countryside might be poorly served by priests, towns
tended to be infested with clergy. Most cities had more than one parish
whose religious and administrative structure resembled rural churches,
but in urban centres personal piety and concentrated wealth resulted in
significant numbers of endowed chantry altars, chapels, and commem-
orative Masses. Towns also housed religious communities such as monas-
teries and convents, as well as clerical administrators, especially in the
cathedral towns which served as diocesan sees (capitals) for a bishop.
Finally, urban educational institutions from grammar schools to univer-
sities were ecclesiastical bodies, whose administrators, teachers, and
 The Late Medieval Crisis 35

students claimed clerical status. While villages were lucky to have their
own priest, in some urban communities one-tenth of the residents
claimed clerical status.
After around 1100 all parishes belonged to a diocese under the spirit-
ual guidance of a bishop. Episcopal sees varied in size, from immense
dioceses such as Lincoln and Constance to the tiny bishopric of Ravello
in Sicily, that stretched two miles at its widest.21 In 1400 there were
263 bishoprics on the Italian peninsula but only 131 in much larger
France. England, Scotland, and Wales combined had only thirty-three
dioceses, one less than neighbouring Ireland.22 The bishop was the
“ordinary” who held all spiritual jurisdiction, though in most of Europe,
except Italy where the dioceses were too small, the bishop exercised
control over his see through archdeacons, archpriests, or rural deans,
who presided over clusters of parishes in the bishop’s name. In some
areas deanery boundaries demarcated the original parish of the mother
church.
The bishop’s chief task was to be the liturgical head of his church.
He should perform all of the sacerdotal rites required of a priest, along
with the sacraments of confirmation for all Christians and holy orders to
ordain the priests needed to meet the spiritual responsibilities of parish
ministry in his diocese. As a result of the Investiture Controversy, clerics
attached to the episcopal cathedral, known as canons, held the exclusive
right to elect the bishop, yet everyone knew that powerful laymen would
influence elections, and by the fourteenth century many bishoprics had
become permanently associated with princely and noble dynasties.
Canons of cathedral chapters were themselves normally members of
elite families. Outside of the tiny Italian bishoprics, it was extremely rare
for a parish priest to become a canon, much less a bishop. Day-to-day
supervision and instruction of the diocesan clergy had never been an
episcopal duty, and bishops had limited control over parochial appoint-
ments and normally accepted the candidates nominated by the various
patrons.
Bishoprics were significant political institutions, and as with parish
benefices, some men held more than one episcopal office. Within the
Holy Roman Empire many bishops were territorial lords as well as eccle-
siastical officials. In Italy urban oligarchic families dominated important
episcopal offices, though here the bishops had less influence. In England,
the kings granted diocesan sees to valued clerical advisors, and once
appointed, English bishops often continued in royal service. In France,
the monarch’s supervision of episcopal elections was recognized by law.
36 Threads of Reformation Histories

Throughout Christendom bishops were seldom appointed for their

religious merit, and many, saddled with governmental or familial respon-
sibilities, resided far from their diocese. Thus co-adjutors or suffragans,
bishops whose “dioceses” were located in former Christian towns under
Moslem rule, performed the day-to-day judicial, liturgical, and adminis-
trative responsibilities of absentee bishops, such as ordinations, confirm-
ation, and parish visitations.
Some bishoprics, such as the see of Toledo in Spain, held the distinc-
tion of primacy over others within an ecclesiastical province, and their
incumbents were referred to as “archbishops”. An archbishop had prestige
and might exert leadership in his province, but the office was never
designed to include specific authority over bishops. Archiepiscopal
courts did play a role in adjudicating disputes between dioceses within
the province or as a step in an appeals process to Rome. The traditional
archiepiscopal synods of provincial clergy rarely occurred in the later
Middle Ages, and bishops basically functioned independently within
their diocese. The quality of orderly religious life depended on firm and
sensitive episcopal administration, and effective governance varied from
diocese to diocese and, within the diocese, from bishop to bishop.
The more conscientious sought to reduce lay exploitation of benefices,
absenteeism, clerical immorality, and concubinage. Nevertheless, given
existing rights of appointment, bishops recruited only a fraction of their
own parish ministry, while the vested interests of local elites in ecclesiastical
affairs often mitigated efforts to discipline beneficed clergy and thwarted
reform programmes. Moreover, monastic communities and religious
orders involved in education and preaching operated throughout the
diocese but outside of episcopal jurisdiction.
Since late antiquity, religious communities of men or women had
cloistered themselves away from the world and worshipped together
after making a profession to live under the guidance of a rule (regula).
These monastic orders of “regular” clergy distinguished themselves from
“secular” clergy, who lived in the world having neither professed nor
entered a cloister. The oldest monastic order in Christendom, the
Benedictines, traced their origins to the sixth-century rule of Benedict of
Nursia. Benedictine rule required obedience to a patriarchal abbot and
a routine schedule of prayer, chant, and work for the cloistered monks.
In many communities the monks’ central labour was copying and illumin-
ating manuscripts, which did much to preserve classical Christian and
pagan writings. Carolingian patronage and later pious donations resulted
in many abbeys acquiring extensive tracts of land, so that as landlords
 The Late Medieval Crisis 37

with feudal rights, monastic communities were often at odds with their
peasant tenants. The Benedictines had no centralized governance system,
and the level of discipline in the houses varied. In earlier centuries
frustration with lax discipline had spawned reform movements among
communities, such as the Cistercians and Carthusians, calling for greater
austerity and more centralized governance, but on the whole, houses
maintained their independence. Originally founded in the countryside
away from settled communities, many houses later attracted settlements
during the medieval demographic expansion. In all, given the autonomy of
houses, it is difficult to generalize about religious behaviour, social power,
and political influence among Benedictines and their reformed branches.
Some regular clergy focused their ministry in towns, where they served
as preachers and teachers. Among these orders, communities of mendi-
cant (begging) friars took a vow of poverty requiring that they beg for
alms to support their ministry. Among the mendicant orders the three
most famous were the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Franciscans.
Founded by Dominic of Calereuga in the early thirteenth century, the
Dominicans practised corporate poverty until 1475, holding only their
churches and friaries. Having begun as a movement to combat heresies,
the Dominicans pursued education at emerging universities, wrote on
theology, preached and administered confession, and served as pros-
ecutors and judges for the Papal Inquisition. Representatives of the vari-
ous houses met yearly at provincial chapters, which in turn sent
representatives to the General Chapter at Rome. The Dominicans
consistently supported papal authority in ecclesiastical policy and acted
as arbiters of orthodoxy. Modelling themselves along the lines of the
Dominicans, the Augustinian Hermits originated in Italy and received
papal sanction in 1256. The Augustinians were closely associated with
universities and urban preaching. Finally the Franciscans, founded by
Francis of Assisi in 1209, competed with the Dominicans as educators,
preachers, and confessors, and the rivalry between these orders often
soured urban religious life. The Franciscans’ commitment to the austere
poverty of their founder was their strength and weakness, as disputes
over the possession of churches and houses and even the quality of their
habit (standard clothing) divided Franciscans. In the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, attacks on clerical wealth associated with radical
Franciscans nearly led to the order’s dissolution.
Most religious orders had female houses, whose members also followed
the rules set down by the founders. Down to the Gregorian reform era,
Benedictine abbesses exerted significant authority over their houses and
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