The Chancery of God

Protestant Print, Polemic and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg 1546–1551

Nathan Rein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754656869
• eBook ISBN: 9781351893145
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The disastrous protestant defeat in the Schmalkaldic War (1546-47) and the promulgation of the Ausburg Interim (1548) left the fate of German Protestantism in doubt. In the wake of these events, a single protestant town, Magdeburg, offered organized, sustained resistance to Emperor Charles V's drive to consolidate Habsburg hegemony and reinstitute uniform Roman Catholic worship throughout Germany. In a flood of printed pamphlets, Magdeburg's leaders justified their refusal to surrender with forceful appeals to religious belief and German tradition. Magdeburg's resistance, interdiction and eventual siege attracted admiring attention from across Europe. The teachings developed and disseminated by Protestant thinkers in defence of the city's stance would ultimately influence political theorists in Switzerland, France, Scotland and even North America. Magdeburg's ordeal formed a signal crisis in the emergence of German Lutheran confessional identity. The Chancery of God is the first English language monograph on Magdeburg's anti-Imperial resistance and pamphlet campaign. The book offers an analysis of Magdeburg's printed output (over 200 publications) during the crucial years of 1546-51, texts which present a broad spectrum of arguments for resistance and suggest a coherent identity and worldview that is characteristically and self-consciously Protestant.

Chapter 1
Pamphlets and Policy

O Magdeburg, stand firm, for thou art a well-built house! Foreign guests are coming, and they want to drive thee out. The guests that are a-coming, they’re known both far and wide; They hound dear Christ in heaven, and harm Christians besides.

(From a mid-century soldiers’ song)¹

In the winter of 1550, the eyes of Germany, and indeed of Europe, were on the city of Magdeburg. The heavily fortified and strategically well-placed city on the banks of the Elbe was under siege. Masses of troops, under the command of Maurice of Saxony, were encamped before its gates. Inside the city, the townsmen were prepared for a long contest. According to their leaders, this war was a salvation-historical event. Their city represented the last bastion of the true faith to hold fast against the Antichrist’s final onslaught, and thus their Protestant faith demanded that they stand firm against their enemies to the point of death. To surrender the city would be to betray Christ. The town’s inhabitants had been storing up provisions and weapons for the previous few years, and their preachers had exhorted them ceaselessly to prepare for the Antichrist’s inevitable attack. One English diplomat wrote admiringly to a friend that Magdeburg’s resistance was now the only thing keeping ‘Cerberus of Rome and Geryon of Spain, the two three-headed ones’ from total domination over European political and ecclesiastical life.

Magdeburg in 1550 was doing two things that attracted the attention of outsiders: first, it was in a de facto state of war with the entire Holy Roman Empire; and second, it had launched a massive printing campaign to justify its actions and derail its enemies’ plans. Both were unheard of. The conflict in which the city found itself embroiled was one of the aftershocks of the Schmalkaldic War, in which the Emperor Charles V had demolished Protestant political presence on the Imperial level. As Charles sought to consolidate his victory and to undo the effects of the Reformation, many Protestant estates reacted with compromises, foot-dragging or temporizing. In contrast, Magdeburg in 1550 was the only former member of the Schmalkaldic League which still offered open and active defiance to Charles’s agenda. This city was fiercely Protestant, and it defended its actions by couching them in religious terms.

This study will examine the way Magdeburg’s defenders presented their case to the public. In the chapter that follows, I will lay out the background for Magdeburg’s propaganda campaign and explain how it came into being; then I will discuss the significance of the city’s printing campaign and its interpretation. I argue that this corpus of texts presents evidence that Magdeburg resistance to the Emperor was intended to protect what we might best call a ‘Protestant way of life’ or a ‘Protestant identity’. With this formulation, I want to convey the idea that while the city’s defenders understood their goal as religious – that is, they saw themselves in the role of defenders of the Protestant Gospel – the basic content of the texts that we will examine does not always square with modern conceptions of what is religious. That is to say, they are not always concerned with dogma or liturgy. Rather, the texts delineate a complex vision of the way theological, political, social, and moral ideas ought to inter-relate. All of these things, I argue, fell for the authors of the Magdeburg texts under the rubric of ‘Protestantism’.

Later in the chapter, we will address with more detail the specifics of the city’s printing campaign. Before we go on, however, I want to stress several aspects of the sources that form the basis for this study. Magdeburg’s printing campaign was the creation largely of a relatively small group of men, who were for the most part Protestant ministers. The sources that we will examine were printed between mid-1546 and the end of 1551, and they are highly topical in character – that is, in general, they respond directly to contemporary events. Thus, over the four-year period that we are examining, our sources can be divided into three discrete groups: first, those that respond to the Schmalkaldic War; second, those that address the publication of the Augsburg Interim (June 1548), and third, those whose primary focus is the siege of the city of Magdeburg (September 1550 to November 1551). Chapters 2–4 will address these groups one by one. However, a single consistent set of principles undergirds the arguments expressed in the pamphlets; Chapter 5 will attempt to identify these principles and discuss how we might use them as a window into the way the Magdeburg Protestants understood their own identity and way of life.

The Magdeburg sources, it is true, represent the opinions of a minority party within the city. In addition to this, one must ask whether their propagandistic character reduces their value as historical sources. In the discussion that follows, I hope to show that, while these objections are well founded in historical fact, they nevertheless do not diminish the value of the Magdeburg texts. Indeed, the fact that they originate with a relatively small group, and the fact that they were published in the service of a concrete and identifiable goal – the justification of Magdeburg’s continuing refusal to make a formal surrender to the Empire – may ultimately make them especially useful as sources. They express, I argue, not so much the generalized beliefs of Protestants everywhere, but rather a highly specific, internally consistent vision of what it means to be Protestant in the mid-sixteenth century.

The sources we will be examining in this study emerged from the aftermath of a convulsive civil war that spanned all of the German lands. In order to set them in context, we will first briefly sketch out the political and religious situation in the Empire over the course of the preceding few decades, focusing particularly on the city of Magdeburg; then we will turn to a discussion of the texts themselves and the problems associated with their interpretation.

Towards Confessional War

The Recess of Speyer concluded the 1526 Imperial Diet with the agreement that both Protestants and Catholics should conduct themselves in matters of religion ‘so that they might answer for it before God and the Imperial Majesty’. This highly ambiguous formulation, which essentially nullified the Edict of Worms and had the practical effect of provisionally decriminalizing Protestant Church reforms, set the stage for twenty years of expansion and consolidation on the part of the Evangelical movement. Princes who were already committed to reform were emboldened to extend and institutionalize the changes they had made, and new adherents were attracted to the movement as well. Three years later, at the Second Diet of Speyer in 1529, these concessions were withdrawn, but without much real effect; the main consequence was to galvanize Protestant anti-Imperial sentiment, to unify the movement, and to convince Protestant leaders of the need for a defensive confessional alliance. Such an alliance eventually took shape over the next few years. The end result of this process was the League of Schmalkalden, chartered in 1531. In this alliance, a geographically far-flung but confessionally narrow range of Lutheran princes and cities swore themselves to mutual defence and the protection of the ‘pure Word of God’.² The well-liked and pious Elector of Saxony, John Frederick the Elder, and the ambitious and shrewd Landgrave Philipp of Hesse headed the League, which was something unprecedented in Imperial politics: a trans-regional alliance embracing princes of all ranks as well as cities, joined by their confessional allegiance. It maintained a treasury and a small standing force, taxed its members, administered internal justice, and by the late 1530s had begun to put an aggressive foreign policy into practice.³ Zwinglian-leaning estates were excluded, despite the wishes of Philipp of Hesse for the broadest possible coalition of the anti-Habsburg religious opposition.

At the same time, the Protestants were moving towards doctrinal consolidation. Increasingly, Protestant religious groups began to define themselves by means of confessional summaries – creedal statements of faith or Bekenntnisschriften that aimed to lay out the fundamentals of belief to which, theoretically at least, all members of the group could subscribe. These creeds tended, to a greater or lesser extent, to reflect political constellations; trans-regional alliances often tried to formulate looser, more inclusive confessions, in order not to close the door to potential alliance partners. Even the revered Augsburg Confession of 1530 served a political purpose and was subscribed, not by ministers, but by rulers. They could divide as well as unify. Luther and Zwingli’s notorious failure to reach agreement on eucharistic doctrine at Marburg in 1529 effectively stymied Hessian plans to move closer to the Swiss Confederation. The most famous confession of this period was Melanchthon’s theologically conservative Augsburg Confession, signed by politicians rather than theologians. Written for presentation to the Imperial estates at the Augsburg Diet of 1530 in the hopes of securing legal toleration once and for all for Luther’s movement, the Catholic estates and the Emperor lost no time in rejecting it.

For fifteen years after the founding of the League of Schmalkalden, there was tension, but no large-scale violence, between the Catholic and Lutheran estates of Germany. The Reformation continued to expand into new territories, and new signatories joined the League. At the same time, the Emperor placed European power before domestic strength, and he was unable to do much to retard the League’s growth. His ambitions of universal monarchy tended to trump the purely national problems of German unity, and he found himself entangled in conflicts and adventures across Europe and the Mediterranean – in the Low Countries, in Hungary, in Italy and in Tunisia. Furthermore, he was involved in an ongoing feud with the house of Valois and its sometime allies, the Pope on the one hand and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent on the other. He required Protestant financial and military support and was prepared to make certain concessions to get it, albeit strictly temporary ones in his view.

However, Charles V never abandoned his intention, or as he saw it, his responsibility, of re-establishing the unity of the German Church. Throughout his reign, Charles had been committed to overcoming the religious schism within the Empire. At the time of Luther’s emergence into public view at the Diet of Worms, Charles had fumed: ‘He will not make a heretic of me!’⁴ The Protestants’ call for a general council, which most agreed would be the appropriate way to a settlement, was eventually echoed at the Imperial court, but diplomatic complications, especially the recurring Habsburg–Valois wars, as well as the curia’s fear of a reinvigorated conciliarist movement, delayed the opening of the council until 1545.

Before Trent’s convocation, another possible means towards reunion had presented itself, namely the religious colloquy or Religionsgespräch.⁵ These were a series of discussions between representatives of both confessions, generally moderate and irenic in sensibility, in an attempt to come up with doctrinal statements to which, in principle, both Protestants and Catholics could subscribe. Participants included papal legates, bishops, theologians and lay jurists from the Catholic side (including Eck, Gropper, Granvella and Contarini), and well-known academics and pastors representing the Protestants (for example, Melanchthon, Capito, Bucer and many others). This phase began with discussions at the Augsburg Imperial Diet in 1530, and continued with meetings at Leipzig in 1534 and 1539, at Hagenau in 1540 and at Regensburg in 1541.

Like the Council, these colloquies ultimately ran aground. In each instance, some doctrinal obstacle proved insuperable, and discussions were broken off in exasperation. Historians still dispute the interpretation of the colloquies; no real consensus even exists on the question of whether the participants (on either side, or on both) actually had a bona fide desire to see them succeed, or who was responsible for their ultimate failure. Some have argued that the Protestant disinclination to negotiate points of doctrine sabotaged the negotiations, while others blame the Catholics’ inability to make any kind of decision without prior approval from Rome. Another influential reading suggests that a form of Erasmian ethical humanism motivated the colloquies but lacked the theological sophistication to deal with the doctrinal differences that divided the participants.⁶ Ultimately, the dismal outcome of the colloquies points again to the relative importance of authority over theology for the principals.

The Regensburg colloquy (April–July 1541) came close to producing an agreement on the vital article of justification. Cardinal Contarini, working with Pflug, Gropper, Eck, Melanchthon, Bucer and Pistorius, succeeded in formulating an article on justification which seemed to satisfy both the Lutheran solafideist premise with the Catholic refusal to see works entirely severed from faith.⁷ This ‘double justification’ would find its way, in a modified form, into the Interim as well. The Regensburg discussions ultimately foundered, however, on Contarini’s unbending insistence on the term ‘transubstantiation’ in the article on the Eucharist. Political pressure from the Imperial chancellor notwithstanding, the theologians were unable to get beyond this stumbling block. From this point on, all plans for reunion centred on the Council of Trent, which, when it convened four years later, quickly dashed all hopes. When it finally did begin, the Protestants immediately perceived that it would bitterly disappoint their hopes of a ‘free Christian council in German lands’: it was entirely dominated by the Pope’s representatives, and as its first doctrinal decision it rejected the Lutheran principle of sola scriptura, depriving the Protestants – if any had been present – of any basis from which to argue.

The failure of both the colloquies and the Council to undo the Reformation’s effects in Germany left the Emperor with one other route open: he would have to seek a military decision against the Protestants. Recurring animosity between the Catholic Duke Henry of Brunswick and the heads of the League led in autumn 1545 to a military confrontation; the heads of the League defeated Henry, imprisoned him and forcibly Protestantized his territory. The Emperor, whose hands had been freed by a settlement with France, took this as a signal to act. During the Diet of Regensburg in mid-1546, he begin to muster troops in the south, publicly stating his intention to punish the League’s heads, whom he designated rebels and renegades.⁸ Throughout the summer, Charles signed treaty after treaty, securing the support of the Pope, his sometime opponents the Wittelsbachs, Margrave Hans of Küstrin, and Maurice of Saxony, John Frederick’s cousin and rival. In a letter to his sister, he remarked, ‘I have decided to open hostilities against Hesse and Saxony as disturbers of the peace … and although this pretence will not entirely convince [the Protestants] that this is not a religious matter, it will divide them for a time.’⁹ The question, whether or not the war could be characterized as ‘religious’ in nature, would prove to be the issue on which both sides’ propaganda hinged: the Protestants insisted that the Emperor’s efforts represented a disguised religious war, while the Emperor justified his acts publicly as purely political in nature.

On the level of Imperial politics, the Emperor’s stratagem worked. Protestant princes who had not committed to the League, by and large, did not come to the aid of their coreligionists, despite the fact that in many areas Protestant ministers did succeed in stirring up anti-Imperial feeling among the populace. The League’s forces, originally in an advantageous position, hesitated to give battle. The tide turned with the entrance of Maurice of Saxony into the war. The young Maurice was a Protestant, and the cousin and rival of Elector John Frederick. Maurice entered the fighting on the Emperor’s side, for which his coreligionists nicknamed him ‘Judas of Meissen’. The war ended at the Battle of Mühlberg (23 April 1547) with a disastrous and embarrassing rout of the Protestant forces. John Frederick was taken into Imperial custody and threatened with capital punishment for treason. Maurice took over a large part of his cousin’s territory. Protestant political fortunes were at their lowest ebb. These were the events...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Pamphlets and Policy
• 2 ‘German Liberty’
• 3 ‘God’s Word, Pure and Clear’: The Interim Controversy
• 4 Urban Theology and the Siegeworks
• 5 Religion and the ‘Magdeburg Worldview’
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index