168 Breach between the Reformers and the humanists Calvin denied.

While Luther adopted the teaching of St Augustine, Erasmus was regarded at Wittenberg as little better than a Pelagian, and his personal conflict with Hutten was soon followed by a more important encounter with Luther. Urged by Catholics to attack the new theology, Erasmus with intuitive skill selected the doctrine of free will, which he asserted in a treatise of great moderation. Luther's reply was remarkable for the unflinching way in which he accepted the logical consequences of his favourite dogma. But that did not make it more palatable, and Erasmus' book confirmed not a few in their antipathy to the Lutheran cause.

These were by no means blind partisans of the Papacy. Murner, the scholar and poet; Jerome Emser, the secretary to Duke George of Saxony; Cochlaeus, Heynlin von Stein, Alexander Hegius, Luther's old master Staupitz, Karl von Miltitz, Johann Faber, Pirkheimer, and many another had long desired a reformation of the Church, but they looked to a General Council and legal methods. Revolution and disruption they considered too great a price to pay for reform, and therefore sadly threw in their lot with the forces which were preparing to do battle for the Catholic Church, purified or corrupt. Slowly also a section of the German laity began to range itself on the same side, and from the confused mêlée of public opinion two organised parties gradually emerged. Here and there this or that form of religious belief obtained a decisive predominance and began to control the organisation of a city or principality in the interests of one or the other party. An infinity of local circumstances contributed to each local decision; dynastic conditions might assist a Prince to determine with which religious party to side, and relations with a neighbouring Bishop or even trading interests might exert a similar influence over the corporate conscience of cities. But with regard to Germany as a whole, and with a few significant exceptions, the frontiers of the Latin Church ultimately coincided to a remarkable extent with those of the old Roman Empire. Where the legions of the Caesars had planted their standards and founded their colonies, where the Latin speech and Latin civilisation had permeated the people, there in the sixteenth century the Roman Church retained its hold. The limits of the Roman Empire are in the main the boundaries between Teutonic and Latin Christianity.

But Latin Christianity saved itself in southern Germany only by borrowing some of the weapons of the original opponents of Rome, and the Counter-Reformation owed its success to its adoption of many of the practical proposals and some of the doctrinal ideas of the Reformation. The confiscation of Church property and the limitation of clerical prerogative went on apace in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries, and, while the spiritual prerogatives of the Papacy were magnified at the Council of Trent, its practical power declined. It secured secular aid by making concessions to the secular power. The earliest example

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Concessions to the Secular Powers

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of this process was seen in Bavaria. Originally Bavaria had been as hostile to the Church as any other part of Germany, and no attempt was there made to execute the Edict of Worms. But what others sought by hostility to the Papacy, the Dukes of Bavaria won by its conciliation, and between 1521 and 1525 a firm alliance was built. up between the Pope and the Dukes on the basis of papal support for the Dukes even against their Bishops. Adrian VI granted them a fifth of all ecclesiastical revenues within their dominions, a source of income which henceforth remained one of the chief pillars of the Bavarian financial system; and another Bull empowered the temporal tribunals to deal with heretics without the concurrence of the Bavarian Bishops, who resented the ducal intrusion into their jurisdictions. The territorial ambition of the Dukes was thus gratified; and the grievances of the laity against the Church were to some extent satisfied by the adoption of measures intended to reform clerical morals; and they both were thus inclined to defend Catholic dogma against Lutheran heresy. A similar grant of Church revenues to the Archduke Ferdinand for use against the Turk facilitated a like result; and Austria and Bavaria became the bulwarks of the Catholic Church in Germany. Other Catholic Princes, like Duke George of Saxony, maintained the faith with more disinterested motives but with less permanent success; while the ecclesiastical Electors of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, were prevented by Lutheran sympathies in the chapters or in the cities of their dioceses from playing the vigorous part in opposition to the national movement which might otherwise have been expected from them.

A like process of crystallisation pervaded the Reforming party. In 1524 Luther effected the final conversion of the Elector Frederick of Saxony, and his brother John who succeeded him in the following year was already a Lutheran. In the same year the youthful and warlike Landgrave Philip of Hesse was won over by Melanchthon and enjoined the preaching of the Gospel throughout his territories. Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg took a similarly decisive step in concurrence with his Estates at Bayreuth in October. The banished Duke Ulrich of Württemberg was also a convert, and Duke Ernest of Lüneburg, a nephew of the Elector Frederick, began a reformation at Celle in 1524. Charles V's sister Isabella listened to Osiander's exhortations at Nürnberg and adopted the new ideas, and her husband, Christian II of Denmark, invited Luther and Carlstadt to preach in his kingdom. He was soon deprived of his throne, but his successor Frederick I adopted a similar religious attitude and promoted the spread of reforming principles in Denmark and in his duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Brandenburg, had also been influenced by Osiander, and, turning his new faith to practical account, he converted the possessions of the Order into the hereditary duchy of Prussia, a fief of the Polish Crown, which received at once a purified

170 The Nürnberg Diets and the Papal Nuncios [1523-4

religion and a new constitution. In the neighbouring duchy of Pomerania the Catholic Bogislav X was succeeded in 1523 by his two sons George and Barnim, of whom the latter was a Lutheran.

The feeble government established at the Diet of Worms in 1521 was quite unable to control this growing cleavage of the nation into two religious parties; but it made some efforts to steer a middle course and it reflected with some fidelity the national hostility to the papal Curia. It had met the Diet for the first time in February, 1522, and it entertained some hopes that the new Pope, Adrian VI, would do something to meet the long list of gravamina which had been drawn up in the previous year and sent to Rome for consideration; but it was late in the summer before Adrian reached the Vatican, and his policy could not be announced to the Diet until its next meeting in November. The papal Nuncio was Francesco Chieregati, an experienced diplomatist, and he came with a conciliatory message. He said nothing about Luther in his first speech to the Diet, and in an interview with Planitz, the Elector Frederick's Chancellor, he admitted the existence of grave abuses in the Papacy, and the partial responsibility of Leo X for them; nor did he deny that Luther had done good work in bringing these abuses to light; though of course the monk's attacks on the sacraments, on the Fathers of the Church, and on Councils could not be tolerated. But this peaceful atmosphere did not endure. Adrian seems to have come to the conclusion that his instructions to Chieregati did not lay sufficient emphasis on papal dignity, and a brief which he addressed to his Nuncio on November 25 was much more minatory. His threats were conveyed to the Diet by Chieregati's speech on January 3, 1523; Luther was denounced as worse than the Turk, and was accused of not merely polluting Germany with his heresy but of aiming at the destruction of all order and property. The Estates were reminded of the end of Dathan and Abiram, of Ananias and Sapphira, of Jerome and Hus; if they separated themselves from God's Holy Church they might incur a similar fate.

Yet the Pope did not deny the abuses of which complaint had been made, and his frank acknowledgement of them supplied the Diet with a cue for their answer. They refused the Nuncio's demand that the Lutheran preachers of Nürnberg should be seized and sent to Rome, and appointed a committee to deal with the question. This body reported that the Pope's acknowledgement of the existence of abuses made it impossible to proceed against Luther for pointing them out; and it carried war into the enemy's territory by demanding that the Pope should surrender German annates to be appropriated to German national purposes, and summon a Council, in which the laity were to be represented, to sit in some German town and deal with the ecclesiastical situation. This report met with some opposition from the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, Duke George of Saxony, and the

1523-4] The Nürnberg Diets and the Papal Nuncios 171

Archduke Ferdinand; but the modifications adopted by the Diet did not seriously alter its import. The Elector Frederick was to be asked to restrain Luther, but probably no one anticipated that his efforts, if he made any, would be successful; no steps were to be taken to execute the Edict of Worms or to silence the Reformers; the Diet reiterated its hundred gravamina, and, although no approbation was expressed of Luther and his cause, the outlawed monk had as much reason to be pleased with the results of the Diet as Chieregati had to be discontented.

Before the Diet assembled again the reforming Adrian had gone the way of his predecessors, and popular feeling at Rome towards reform. was expressed by the legend inscribed on the door of the dead Pope's physician Liberatori patriae. Another Medici sat on the throne of Leo X, and religious reform was exchanged for family politics. But even Clement VII felt the necessity of grappling with the German problem, and Lorenzo Campeggio was sent to the Diet which again met at Nürnberg in January, 1524. As he entered Augsburg and gave his benediction to the crowd, he was met with jeers and insults. At Nürnberg, which he reached on March 16, the Princes advised him to make a private entry for fear of hostile demonstrations, and on Maundy Thursday under his very eyes three thousand people, including the Emperor's sister, received the communion in both forms. His mission seemed a forlorn hope, but there were a few breaks in the gloom. The Reichsregiment, which had on the whole been more advanced in religious opinion than the Diets, had lost the respect of the people. The repudiation of its authority by the towns, the knights, and several of the Princes, with the encouragement of the Emperor, indicated the speedy removal of this shield of Lutheranism, and the vote of censure carried against the government seemed to open the door to reaction.

Campeggio accordingly again demanded the execution of the Edict of Worms, and he was supported by Charles V's Chancellor, Hannart, who had been sent from Spain to aid the cities in their resistance to the financial proposals of the Reichsregiment. But the cities, in spite of their repudiation of Lutheranism in Spain, were now indignant at the idea of enforcing the Edict of Worms, and the Diet itself was angry because Campeggio brought no other answer to its repeated complaints than the statement that the Holy Father could not believe such a document to be the work of the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire. So the old struggle was fought over again, and the inevitable compromise differed only in shades of meaning from that of the previous year. The Edict should, indeed, be executed "as well as they were able, and as far as was possible"; but the Estates did not profess any greater ability than before. A General Council was again demanded, and pending its not very probable or speedy assemblage, a national Synod was to be summoned to meet at Speier in November, and there make an interim settlement of all the practical and doctrinal questions at issue.

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Demand for a General Council

[1524

The prospect of such a meeting alarmed both Pope and Emperor more than all the demands for a General Council; for in a General Council the Germans would be a minority, and General Councils afforded unlimited scope for delay. But a German Synod would mean business, and its business was not likely to please either Clement or Charles. It would probably organise a German national Church with slight dependence on Rome; it might establish a national government with no more dependence on Charles. Both these threatened interests took action; the Pope instigated Henry VIII to take away from the German merchants of the Steelyard their commercial privileges, and to urge upon Charles the prohibition of the meeting at Speier; he also suggested the deposition of the Elector Frederick as a warning to other rebellious Princes. The Emperor was nothing loth; on July 15 he forbade the proposed assembly at Speier, and, although there is no evidence that he would have proceeded to so dangerous and violent a measure as the deposition of Frederick, he broke off former friendly relations and insulted the whole Saxon House by marrying his sister Catharine to King John of Portugal instead of to Frederick's nephew, John Frederick, to whom she had been betrothed as the price of the Elector's support of Charles' candidature for the Empire in 1519.

Before the news of these steps had reached Germany both sides had begun preparations for the struggle. Campeggio had been empowered, in case of the failure of his mission to the Diet, to organise a sectional gathering of Catholic Princes in order to frustrate the threatened national Council. This assembly, the first indication of the permanent religious disruption of Germany, met at Ratisbon towards the end of June. Its principal members were the Archduke Ferdinand, the two Dukes of Bavaria, and nine bishops of southern Germany; and the anti-national character of the meeting was emphasised by the abstinence of every elector, lay or clerical. It was, however, something more than a particularist gathering; it sought to take the wind out of the sails of the Reformation by reforming the Church from within, and it was in fact a Counter-Reformation in miniature. The spiritual lords consented to pay a fifth of their revenues to the temporal authority as the price of the suppression of Lutheran doctrine. The grievances of the laity with respect to clerical fees and clerical morals were to some extent redressed; the excessive number of saints' days and holy days was curtailed. The use of excommunication and interdict for trivial matters was forbidden; and while the reading of Lutheran books was prohibited, preachers were enjoined to expound the Scriptures according to the teaching, not of medieval schoolmen, but of the great Fathers of the Church, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory. Eck published a collection of Loci Communes to counteract Melanchthon's, and Emser a version of the Bible to correct Luther's, and a systematic persecution of heretics was commenced in the territories of the parties to the conference.