Chapter IV: , VII (31)

In one sense, the French had nothing to show for this their
first expedition of conquest. In another sense they had much
to show and their gain was great. They had made their first
acquaintance with the superior culture of Italy. They had
breathed the air beyond the Alps, which was then surcharged
with the inspirations of the Renaissance. Both the ideas and
the spoil they brought back were of more value to France than
can be easily estimated. They had returned laden with booty,
and much of it was in treasures of art, every sight of which
was a lesson to the sense of beauty and the taste of the
people among whom they were shown. The experience and the
influence of the Italian expedition were undoubtedly very
great, and the Renaissance in France, as an artistic and a
literary birth, is reasonably dated from it.

Italian Wars of Louis XII.

Charles VIII. died suddenly in 1498 and was succeeded by his
cousin, of the Orleans branch of the Valois family, Louis XII.
The new king was weak in character, but not wicked. His first
thought on mounting the throne was of the claims of his family
to other thrones, in Italy. Besides the standing Angevin claim
to the kingdom of Naples, he asserted rights of his own to the
duchy of Milan, as a descendant of Valentina Visconti, heiress
of the ducal house which the Sforzas supplanted. In 1499 he sent
an army against Louis the Moor, and the latter fled from Milan
without an attempt at resistance. Louis took possession of the
duchy with the greatest good will of the people; but, before
half a year had passed, French taxes, French government, and
French manners had disgusted them, and they made an attempt to
restore their former tyrant. The attempt failed, and Louis the
Moor was imprisoned in France for the remainder of his life.

Milan secured, Louis XII. began preparations to repeat the
undertaking of Charles VIII. against Naples. The Neapolitan
crown had now passed to an able and popular king, Frederick,
and Frederick had every reason to suppose that he would be
supported and helped by his kinsman, Ferdinand of Aragon, the
well-known consort of Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand had the
power to hold the French king in check; but instead of using
it for the defense of the Neapolitan branch of his house, he
secretly and treacherously agreed with Louis to divide the
kingdom of Naples with him. Under these circumstances, the
conquest was easily accomplished (1501). The betrayed
Frederick surrendered to Louis, and lived as a pensionary in
France until his death. The Neapolitan branch of the House of
Aragon came to an end.

Louis and Ferdinand speedily quarreled over the division of
their joint conquest. The treacherous Spaniard cheated the
French king in treaty negotiations, gaining time to send
forces into Italy which expelled the French. It was in this
war that the Spanish general, Gonsalvo di Cordova, won the
reputation which gave him the name of "the Great Captain"; and
it was likewise in this war that the chivalric French knight,
Bayard, began the winning of his fame.

The League of Cambrai and the Holy League.

Naples had again slipped from the grasp of France, and this
time it had passed to Spain. Louis XII. abandoned the tempting
kingdom to his rival, and applied himself to the establishing
of his sovereignty over Milan and its domain. Some territory
formerly belonging to the Milaness had been ceded to Venice by
the Sforzas. He himself had ceded another district or two to
the republic in payment for services rendered. Ferdinand of
Spain had made payments in the same kind of coin, from his
Neapolitan realm, for Venetian help to secure it.
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The warlike Pope Julius II. saw Rimini and other towns
formerly belonging to the States of the Church now counted
among the possessions of the proud mistress of the Adriatic.
All of these disputants in Italy resented the gains which
Venice had gathered at their expense, and envied and feared
her somewhat insolent prosperity. They accordingly suspended
their quarrels with one another, to form a league for breaking
her down and for despoiling her. The Emperor Maximilian, who had
grievances of his own against the Venetians, joined the
combination, and Florence was bribed to become a party to it
by the betrayal of Pisa into her hands. Thus was formed the
shameful League of Cambrai (1508). The French did most of the
fighting in the war that ensued, though Pope Julius, who took
the field in person, easily proved himself a better soldier
than priest. The Venetians were driven for a time from the
greater part of the dominion they had acquired on the
mainland, and were sorely pressed. But they made terms with
the Pope, and it then became his interest, not merely to stop
the conquests of his allies, but to press them out of Italy,
if possible. He began accordingly to intrigue against the
French, and presently had a new league in operation, making
war upon them. It was called a Holy League, because the head
of the Church was its promoter, and it embraced the Emperor,
King Ferdinand of Spain, King Henry VIII. of England, and the
Republic of Venice. As the result of the ruthless and
destructive war which they waged, Louis XII., before he died,
in 1515, saw all that he had won in Lombardy stripped from him
and restored to the Sforzas—the old family of the Dukes of
Milan; Venice recovered most of her possessions, but never
regained her former power, since the discovery of the ocean
route to India, round the Cape of Good Hope, was now turning
the rich trade of the East, the great source of her wealth,
into the hands of the Portuguese; the temporal dominion of the
Popes was enlarged by the recovery of Bologna and Perugia and by
the addition of Parma and Piacenza; and Florence, which had
been a republic since the death of Savonarola, was forced to
submit anew to the Medici.

The Age of Infamous Popes.

The fighting Pope, Julius II., who made war and led armies,
while professing to be the vicar of Him who brought the
message of good-will and peace to mankind, was very far from
being the worst of the popes of his age. He was only worldly,
thinking much of his political place as a temporal sovereign
in Italy, and little of his spiritual office as the head of
the Church of Christ. As the sovereign of Rome and the Papal
States, Julius II. ran a brilliant career, and is one of the
splendid figures of the Italian renaissance. Patron of Michael
Angelo and Raphael, projector of St. Peter's, there is a
certain grandeur in his character to be admired, if we could
forget the pretended apostolic robe which he smirched with
perfidious politics and stained with blood.

But the immediate predecessors of Julius II., Sixtus IV. and
Alexander VI., had had nothing in their characters to lure
attention from the hideous examples of bestial wickedness
which they set before the world. Alexander, especially, the
infamous Borgia,—systematic murderer and robber, liar and
libertine,—accomplished practitioner of every crime and every
vice that was known to the worst society of a depraved
generation, and shamelessly open in the foulest of his
doings,—there is scarcely a pagan monster of antiquity that
is not whitened by comparison with him. Yet he sat in the
supposed seat of St. Peter for eleven years, to be venerated
as the Vicar of Christ, the "Holy Father" of the Christian
Church; his declarations and decrees in matters of faith to be
accepted as infallible inspirations; his absolution to be
craved as a passport to Heaven; his anathema to be dreaded as
a condemnation to Hell!

This evil and malignant being died in 1503. poisoned by one of
his own cups, which he had brewed for another. Julius II.
reigned until 1513; and after him came the Medicean Pope, Leo
X., son of Lorenzo the Magnificent,—princely and worldly as
Julius, but in gentler fashion; loving ease, pleasure, luxury,
art, and careless of all that belonged to religion beyond its
ceremonies and its comfortable establishment of clerical
estates. Is it strange that Christendom was prepared to give
ear to Luther?

Luther and the Reformation.

When Luther raised his voice, he did but renew a protest which
many pure and pious and courageous men before him had uttered,
against evils in the Church and falsities and impostures in
the Papacy. But some of them, like Arnold of Brescia, like
Peter Waldo, and the Albigenses, had been too far in advance
of their time, and their revolt was hopeless from the
beginning. Wyclif's movement had been timed unfortunately in
an age of great commotions, which swallowed it up. That of
Huss had roused an ignorant peasantry, too uncivilized to
represent a reformed Christianity, and had been ruined by the
fierceness of their misguided zeal. The Reformation of
Savonarola, at Florence, had been nobly begun, but not wisely
led, and it had spent its influence at the end on aims less
religious than political.

But there occurred a combination, when Luther arose, of
character in himself, of circumstances in his country, and of
temper in his generation, which made his protest more
lastingly effective. He had high courage, without rashness. He
had earnestness and ardor, without fanaticism. He had the
plain good sense and sound judgment which win public
confidence. His substantial learning put him on terms with the
scholars of his day, and he was not so much refined by it as
to lose touch with the common people. A certain coarseness in
his nature was not offensive to the time in which he lived,
but rather belonged among the elements of power in him. His
spirituality was not fine, but it was strong. He was sincere,
and men believed in him. He was open, straightforward, manly,
commanding respect. His qualities showed themselves in his
speech, which went straight to its mark, in the simplest
words, moulding the forms and phrases of the German language
with more lasting effect than the speech of any other man who
ever used it. Not many have lived in any age or any country
who possessed the gift of so persuasive a tongue, with so
powerful a character to command the hearing for it.

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And the generation to which Luther spoke really waited for a
bold voice to break into the secret of its thoughts concerning
the Church. It had inherited a century of alienation from
quarreling popes and greedy, corrupted priests and now there
had been added in its feeling the deep abhorrence roused by
such villains as the Borgia in the papal chair, and by their
creatures and minions in the priesthood of the Church. If it
is crediting too much to the common multitude of the time to
suppose them greatly sickened by the vices and corruptions of
their priests, we may be sure, at least, that they were
wearied and angered by the exactions from them, which a
vicious hierarchy continually increased. The extravagance of
the Papacy kept pace with its degradation, and Christendom
groaned under the burden of the taxes that were wrung from it
in the name of the lowly Saviour of mankind.

Nowhere in Europe were the extortions of the Church felt more
severely than in Germany, where the serfdom of the peasants
was still real and hard, and where the depressing weight of
the feudal system had scarcely been lifted from society at
all. Feudalism had given way in that country less than in any
other. Central authority remained as weak, and national
solidification as far away, as ever. Of organic unity in the
heterogeneous bundle of electoral principalities, duchies,
margravates and free cities which made up the nominal realm of
the King of the Romans, there was no more at the beginning of
the sixteenth century than there had been in the twelfth. But
that very brokenness and division in the political state of
Germany proved to be one of the circumstances which favored
the Protestant Reformation of the Church. Had monarchical
authority established itself there as in France, then the
Austro-Spanish family which wielded it, with the concentrated
bigotry of their narrow-minded race, would have crushed the
religious revolt as completely in Saxony as they did in
Austria and Bohemia.

The Ninety-five Theses.

The main events of the Reformation in Germany are so commonly
known that no more than the slightest sketching of them is
needed here. Letters of indulgence, purporting to grant a
remission of the temporal and purgatorial penalties of sin,
had been sold by the Church for centuries; but none before
Pope Leo X. had made merchandize of them in so peddlar-like
and shameful a fashion as that which scandalized the
intelligent piety of Europe in 1517. Luther, then a professor
in the new University of Wittenberg, Saxony, could not hide
his indignation, as most men did. He stood forth boldly and
challenged the impious fraud, in a series of propositions or
theses, which, after the manner of the time, he nailed to the
door of Wittenberg Church. Just that bold action was needed to
let loose the pent-up feeling of the German people. The
ninety-five theses were printed and went broadcast through the
land, to be read and to be listened to, and to stir every
class with independent ideas. It was the first great appeal
made to the public opinion of the world, after the invention
of printing had put a trumpet to the mouths of eloquent men,
and the effect was too amazing to be believed by the careless
Pope and his courtiers.

Political Circumstances.

But more than possibly—probably, indeed—the popular feeling
stirred up would never have accomplished the rupture with Rome
and the religious independence to which North Germany attained
in the end, if political motives had not coincided with
religious feelings to bring certain princes and great nobles
into sympathy with the Monk of Wittenberg. The Elector of
Saxony, Luther's immediate sovereign, had long been in
opposition to the Papacy on the subject of its enormous
collections of money from his subjects, and he was well
pleased to have the hawking of indulgences checked in his
dominions. Partly for this reason, partly because of the pride
and interest with which he cherished his new University,
partly from personal liking and admiration of Luther, and
partly, too, no doubt, in recognition of the need of Church
reforms, he gave Luther a quiet protection and a concealed
support. He was the strongest and most influential of the
princes of the Empire, and his obvious favor to the movement
advanced it powerfully and rapidly.

At first, there was no intention to break with the Papacy and
the Papal Church,—certainly none in Luther's mind. His
attitude towards both was conciliatory in every way, except as
concerned the falsities and iniquities which he had protested
against. It was not until the Pope, in June, 1520, launched
against him the famous Bull, "Exurge Domine," which left no
alternative between abject submission and open war, that
Luther and his followers cast off the authority of the Roman
Church and its head, and grounded their faith upon Holy
Scripture alone. By formally burning the Bull, Luther accepted
the papal challenge, and those who believed with him were
ready for the contest.

The Diet of Worms.

In 1521, the reformer was summoned before a Diet of the
Empire, at Worms, where a hearing was given him. The influence
of the Church, and of the young Austro-Spanish Emperor,
Charles V., who adhered to it, was still great enough to
procure his condemnation; but they did not dare to deal with
him as Huss had been dealt with. He was suffered to depart
safely, pursued by an imperial edict which placed the ban of
the Empire on all who should give him countenance or support.
His friends among the nobles spirited him away and concealed
him in a castle, the Wartburg, where he remained for several
months, employed in making his translation of the Bible.
Meantime, the Emperor had been called away from Germany by his
multifarious affairs, in the Netherlands and Spain, and had
little attention to give to Luther and the questions of
religion for half-a-dozen years. He was represented in Germany
by a Council of Regency, with the Elector of Saxony at the
head of, it; and the movement of reformation, if not
encouraged in his absence, was at least considerably
protected. It soon showed threatening signs of wildness and
fanaticism in many quarters; but Luther proved himself as
powerful in leadership as he had been in agitation, and the
religious passion of the time was controlled effectively, on
the whole.

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Organization of the Lutheran Church.

Before the close of the year 1521, Pope Leo X. died, and his
successor, Adrian, while insisting upon the enforcement of the
Edict of Worms against Luther and his supporters, yet
acknowledged the corruptions of the Church and promised a
reformation of them. His promises came too late; his
confessions only gave testimony to the independent reformers
which their opponents could not impeach. There was no longer
any thought of cleansing the Church of Rome, to abide in it. A
separated—a restored Church—was clearly determined on, and
Luther framed a system of faith and discipline which was
adopted in Saxony, and then accepted very generally by the
reformed Churches throughout Germany. In 1525, the Elector
Frederick of Saxony died. He had quietly befriended the
Lutherans and tolerated the reform, but never identified
himself with them. His brother, John, who succeeded him, made
public profession of his belief in the Lutheran doctrines, and
authoritatively established the church system which Luther had
introduced. The Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Margrave of
Brandenburg, and the Dukes of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Zell,
followed his example; while the imperial cities of Frankfort,
Nuremberg, Bremen, Strasburg, Brunswick, Nordhausen, and
others, formally ranged themselves on the same side. By the
year 1526, when a diet at Spires declared the freedom of each
state in the Empire to deal with the religious reform
according to its own will, the Reformation in Germany was a
solidly organized fact. But those of the reform had not yet
received their name, of "Protestants." That came to them three
years later, when the Roman party had rallied its forces in a
new diet at Spires, to undo the declaration of 1526, and the
leaders of the Lutheran party recorded their solemn protest.

The Austro-Burgundian Marriage.

To understand the situation politically, during the period of
struggle for and against the Reformation, it will be necessary
to turn back a little, for the noting of important occurrences
which have not been mentioned.

When Albert II., who was King of Hungary and Bohemia, as well
as King of the Romans (Emperor-elect, as the title came to be,
soon afterwards), died, in 1439, he was succeeded by his
second cousin Frederick III., Duke of Styria, and from that
time the Roman or imperial crown was held continuously in the
Austrian family, becoming practically hereditary. But
Frederick did not succeed to the duchy of Austria, and he
failed of election to the throne in Hungary and Bohemia. Hence
his position as Emperor was peculiarly weak and greatly
impoverished, through want of revenue from any considerable
possessions of his own. During his whole long reign, of nearly
fifty-four years, Frederick was humiliated and hampered by his
poverty; the imperial authority was brought very low, and
Germany was in a greatly disordered state. There were frequent
wars between its members, and between Austria and Bohemia, with
rebellions in Vienna and elsewhere; while the Hungarians were
left to contend with the aggressive Turks, almost unhelped.

But in 1477 a remarkable change in the circumstances and
prospects of the family of the Emperor Frederick III. was made
by the marriage of his son and heir, Maximilian, to Mary, the
daughter and heiress of the wealthy and powerful Duke of
Burgundy, Charles the Bold. The bridegroom was so poor that
the bride is said to have loaned him the money which enabled
him to make a fit appearance at the wedding. She had lost, as
we saw, the duchy of Burgundy, but the valiant arm of
Maximilian enabled her to hold the Burgundian county, Franche
Comté, and the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which formed
at that time, perhaps, the most valuable principality in
Europe. The Duchess Mary lived only five years after her
marriage; but she left a son, Philip, who inherited the
Netherlands and Franche Comté, and Maximilian ruled them as
his guardian.

In 1493, the Emperor Frederick died, and Maximilian, who had
been elected King of the Romans some years before, succeeded
him in the imperial office. He was never crowned at Rome, and
he took the title, not used before, of King of Germany and
Emperor-elect. He was Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria,
Carinthia and Carniola, and Count of Tyrol; and, with his
guardianship in the Low Countries, he rose greatly in
importance and power above his father. But he accomplished
less than might possibly have been done by a ruler of more
sureness of judgment and fixity in purpose. His plans were
generally beyond his means, and the failures in his
undertakings were numerous. He was eager to interfere with the
doings of Charles VIII. and Louis XIII. in Italy; but the
Germanic diet gave him so little support that he could do
nothing effective. He joined the League of Cambrai against
Venice, and the Holy League against France, but bore no
important part in either. His reign was signalized in Germany
by the division of the nation into six administrative
"Circles," afterwards increased to ten, and by the creation of
a supreme court of appeal, called the Imperial Chamber,—both
of which measures did something towards the diminution of
private wars and disorders.

The Austro-Spanish Marriage.—Charles V.

But Maximilian figures most conspicuously in history as the
immediate ancestor of the two great sovereign dynasties—the
Austrian and the Austro-Spanish—which sprang from his
marriage with Mary of Burgundy and which dominated Europe for
a century after his death. His son Philip, heir to the
Burgundian sovereignty of the Netherlands, married (1496)
Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Two
children, Charles and Ferdinand, were the fruit of this
marriage. Charles, the elder, inherited more crowns and
coronets than were ever gathered, in reality, by one
sovereign, before or since. Ferdinand and Isabella had united
by their marriage the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and, by
the conquest of Granada and the partial conquest of Navarre,
the entire peninsula, except Portugal, was subsequently added
to their joint dominion. Joanna inherited the whole, on the
death of Isabella, in 1504, and the death of Ferdinand, in
1516. She also inherited from her father, Ferdinand, the
kingdom of the Two Sicilies—which he had reunited—and the
island of Sardinia. Philip, on his side, already in possession
of the Netherlands and Franche Comté, was heir to the domain of
the House of Austria. Both of these great inheritances
descended in due course to Charles, and he had not long to
wait for them. His father, Philip, died in 1506, and his
mother, Joanna, lost her mind, through grief at that event.
The death of his Spanish grandfather, Ferdinand, occurred in
1516, and that of his Austrian grandfather, the Emperor
Maximilian, followed three years later.
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At the age of twenty years (representing his mother in her
incapacity) Charles found himself sovereign of Spain, and
America, of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Low Countries,
Franche Comté, Austria, and the duchies associated with it.
The same year (1519) he was chosen King of Germany and
Emperor-elect, after a keen contest over the imperial crown,
in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England were
his competitors. On attaining this dignity, he conferred the
Austrian possessions on his brother Ferdinand. But he remained
the most potent and imposing monarch that Europe had seen
since Charlemagne. He came upon the stage just as Luther had
marshalled, in Germany, the reforming forces of the new era,
against intolerable iniquities in the Papal Church.
Unfortunately, he came, with his vast armament of powers, to
resist the demands of his age, and to be the champion of old
falsities and wrongs, both in Church and State. There was
nothing in the nature of the man, nor in his education, nor in
the influences which bore upon him, from either the Spanish or
the Austrian side of his family, to put him in sympathy with
lifting movements or with liberal ideas. He never formed a
conception of the world in which it looked larger to his eyes,
or signified more to him, than the globe upon his scepter. So,
naturally enough, this Cæsar of the Renaissance (Charles V. in
Germany and Charles I. in Spain) did his utmost, from the day
he climbed the throne, to thrust Europe back into the murk of
the fourteenth century, which he found it pretty nearly
escaped from. He did not succeed; but he gave years of misery
to several countries by his exertions, and he resigned the
task to a successor whom the world is never likely to tire of
abhorring and despising.

The end of popular freedom in Spain.

The affairs which called Charles V. away from Germany, after
launching his ineffectual edict of Worms against Luther and
Luther's supporters, grew in part out of disturbances in his
kingdom of Spain. His election to the imperial office had not
been pleasing to the Spaniards, who anticipated the
complications they would be dragged into by it, the foreign
character which their sovereign (already foreign in mind by
his education in the Netherlands) would be confirmed in, and
the indifference with which their grievances would be
regarded. For their grievances against the monarchy had been
growing serious in the last years of Ferdinand, and since his
death. The crown had gained power in the process of political
centralization, and its aggrandizement from the possession of
America began to loom startlingly in the light of the conquest
of Mexico, just achieved. During the absence of Charles in
Germany, his former preceptor, Cardinal Adrian, of Utrecht,
being in charge of the government as regent, a revolt broke
out at Toledo which spread widely and became alarming. The
insurgents organized their movement under the name of the
Santa Junta, or Holy League, and having obtained possession of
the demented Queen, Joanna, they assumed to act for her and
with her authority. This rebellion was suppressed with
difficulty; but the suppression was accomplished (1521-1522),
and it proved to be the last struggle for popular freedom in
Spain. The government used its victory with an unsparing
determination to establish absolute powers, and it succeeded.
The conditions needed for absolutism were already created, in
fact, by the deadly blight which the Inquisition had been
casting upon Spain for forty years. Since the beginning of the
frightful work of Torquemada, in 1483, it had been diligently
searching out and destroying every germ of free thought and
manly character that gave the smallest sign of fruitfulness in
the kingdom; and the crushing of the Santa Junta may be said
to have left few in Spain who deserved a better fate than the
political, the religious and the intellectual servitude under
which the nation sank.

Persecution of the Spanish Moriscoes.

Charles, whose mind was dense in its bigotry, urged on the
Inquisition, and pointed its dreadful engines of destruction
against the unfortunate Moriscoes, or Moors, who had been
forced to submit to Christian baptism after their subjugation.
Many of these followers of Mahomet had afterwards taken up
again the prayers and practices of their own faith, either
secretly or in quiet ways, and their relapse appears to have
been winked at, more or less. For they were a most useful
people, far surpassing the Spaniards in industry, in thrift
and knowledge of agriculture, and in mechanical skill. Many of
the arts and manufactures of the kingdom were entirely in
their hands. It was ruinous to interfere with their peaceful
labors. But Charles, as heathenish as the Grand Turk when it
suited his ends to be so, could look on these well-behaved and
useful Moors with no eyes but the eyes of an orthodox piety, and
could take account of nothing but their infidel faith. He
began, therefore, in 1524, the heartless, senseless and
suicidal persecution of the Moriscoes which exterminated them
or drove them from the land, and which contributed signally to
the making of Spain an exemplary pauper among the nations.

Despotism of Charles V. in the Netherlands.

In his provinces of the Low Countries, Charles found more than
in Spain to provoke his despotic bigotry. The Flemings and the
Dutch had been tasting of freedom too much for his liking, in
recent years, and ideas, both political and religious, had
been spreading among them, which were not the ideas of his
august mind, and must therefore, of necessity, be false. They
had already become infected with the rebellious anti-papal
doctrines of Luther. Indeed, they had been even riper than
Luther's countrymen for a religious revolution, when he
sounded the signal note which echoed through all northern
Europe. In Germany, the elected emperor could fulminate an
edict against the audacious reformers, but he had small power
to give force to it. In the Netherlands, he possessed a
sovereignty more potent, and he took instant measures to
exercise the utmost arbitrariness of which he could make it
capable. The Duchess Margaret, his aunt, who had been
governess of the provinces, was confirmed by him in that
office, and he enlarged the powers in her commission. His
commands practically superseded the regular courts, and
subjected the whole administration of justice to his arbitrary
will and that of his representative. At the same time they
stripped the States of their legislative functions and reduced
them to insignificance.
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Having thus trampled on the civil liberties of the provinces,
he borrowed the infernal enginery of the Inquisition, and
introduced it for the destruction of religious freedom. Its
first victims were two Augustine monks, convicted of
Lutheranism, who were burned at Brussels, in July, 1523. The
first martyr in Holland was a priest who suffered impalement
as well as burning, at the Hague, in 1525. From these
beginnings the persecution grew crueler as the alienation of
the stubborn Netherlanders from the Church of Rome widened;
and Charles did not cease to fan its fires with successive
proclamations or "placards," which denounced and forbade every
reading of Scripture, every act of devotion, every
conversation of religion, in public or private, which the
priests of the Church did not conduct. "The number of
Netherlanders who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried
alive, in obedience to his edicts, … have been placed as
high as 100,000 by distinguished authorities, and have never
been put at a lower mark than 50,000."

Charles V. and Francis I. in Italy.

These exercises of an autocratic piety in Spain and the Low
Countries may be counted, perhaps, among the pleasures of the
young Emperor during the earlier years of his reign. His more
serious affairs were connected mainly with his interests or
ambitions in Italy, which seemed to be threatened by the King
of France. The throne in that country was now occupied by
Francis I., a cousin of Louis XII., who had succeeded the
latter in 1515, and who had taken up anew the Italian projects
in which Louis failed. In the first year of his reign, he
crossed the Alps with an army, defeated the Swiss whom the
Duke of Milan employed against him, and won the whole duchy by
that single fight. This re-establishment of the French at
Milan was regarded with exceeding jealousy by the Austrian
interest, and by the Pope. Maximilian, shortly before his
death, had made a futile effort to dislodge them, and Charles
V., on coming to the throne, lost no time in organizing plans
to the same end. He entered into an alliance with Pope Leo X.,
by a treaty which bears the same date as the Edict of Worms
against Luther, and there can be little doubt that the two
instruments were part of one understanding. Both parties
courted the friendship of Henry VIII. of England, whose power
and importance had risen to a high mark, and Henry's able
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, figured notably in the diplomatic
intrigues which went on during many years.

War began in 1521, and in three months the French were
expelled from nearly every part of the Milanese territory.
Pope Leo X. lived just long enough to receive the news. His
successor was Adrian VI., former tutor of the Emperor, who
made vain attempts to arrange a peace. Wolsey had brought
Henry VIII. of England into the alliance against Francis,
expecting to win the papal tiara through the Emperor's
influence; but he was disappointed.

Francis made an effort in 1523 to recover Milan; but was
crippled at the moment of sending his expedition across the
Alps by the treason of the most powerful noble of France, the
Constable, Charles, Duke of Bourbon. The Constable had been
wronged and affronted by the King's mother, and by intriguers
at court, and he revenged himself basely by going over to the
enemies of his country. In the campaigns which followed
(1523-1524), the French had ill-success, and lost their
chivalrous and famous knight, Bayard, in one of the last
skirmishes of their retreat. Another change now occurred in
the occupancy of the papal throne, and Wolsey's ambitious
schemes were foiled again. The new Pope was Giulio de'Medici,
who took the name of Clement VII.

Once more the King of France, in October, 1524, led his forces
personally into Italy and laid siege to Pavia. It was a
ruinous undertaking. He was defeated overwhelmingly in a
battle fought before Pavia (February 24, 1525) and taken
prisoner. After a captivity in Spain of nearly a year, he
regained his freedom disgracefully, by signing and solemnly
swearing to a treaty which he never intended to observe. By
this treaty he not only renounced all claims to Milan, Naples,
Genoa, and other Italian territory, but he gave up the duchy
of Burgundy. Released in good faith on these terms, in the
early part of 1526, he perfidiously repudiated the treaty, and
began fresh preparations for war. He found the Italians now as
ready to oust the Spaniards from their peninsula with French
help, as they had been ready before to expel the French with
help from Spain. The papal interest was in great alarm at the
power acquired by the Emperor, and Venice and Milan shared the
feeling. A new "Holy Alliance" was accordingly formed, with
the Pope at its head, and with Henry VIII. of England for its
"Protector." But before this League took the field with its
forces, Rome and Italy were stricken and trampled, as though
by a fresh invasion of Goths.

Sack of Rome, by the army of the Constable.

The imperial army, quartered in the duchy of Milan, under the
command of the Constable Bourbon, was scantily paid and fed.
The soldiers were forced to plunder the city and country for
their subsistence, and, of course, under those circumstances,
there was little discipline among them. The region which they
terrorized was soon exhausted, by their robberies and by the
stoppage of industries and trade. It then became necessary for
the Constable to lead them to new fields, and he moved
southwards. His forces were made up in part of Spaniards and
in part of Germans—the latter under a Lutheran commander, and
enlisted for war with the Pope and for pillage in Italy. He
directed the march to Rome, constrained, perhaps, by the
demands of his soldiery, but expecting, likewise, to crush the
League by seizing its apostolic head. On the 5th of May, 1527,
his 40,000 brigands arrived before the city. At daybreak, the
next morning, they assaulted the walls irresistibly and
swarmed over them. Bourbon was killed in the assault, and his
men were left uncontrolled masters of the venerable capital of
the world. They held it for seven months, pillaging and
destroying, committing every possible excess and every
imaginable sacrilege. Rome is believed to have suffered at
their hands more lasting defacement and loss of the splendors
of its art than from the sacking of Vandals or Goths.

The Pope held out in Castle St. Angelo for a month and then
surrendered. The hypocritical Charles V., when he learned what
his imperially commissioned bandits had done, made haste to
express horror and grief, but did not hasten to check or
repair the outrage in the least. Pope Clement was not released
from captivity until a great money-payment had been extorted
from him, with the promise of a general council of the Church
to reform abuses and to eradicate Lutheranism.

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Spanish Domination in Italy.

Europe was shocked by the barbarity of the capture of Rome,
and the enemies leagued against Charles were stimulated to
more vigorous exertions. Assisted with money from England,
Francis sent another army into Italy, which took Genoa and
Pavia and marched to Naples, blockading the city by sea and
land. But the siege proved fatal to the French army. So many
perished of disease that the survivors were left at the mercy
of the enemy, and capitulated in September, 1528.

The great Genoese Admiral, Andrea Doria, had been offended,
meantime, by King Francis, and had excited his fellow citizens
to a revolution, which made Genoa, once more, an independent
republic, with Doria at its head. Shortly before this
occurred, Florence had expelled the Medici and reorganized her
government upon the old republican basis. But the defeat of
the French before Naples ended all hope of Italian liberty;
since the Pope resigned himself after that event to the will
of the Emperor, and the papal and imperial despotisms became
united as one, to exterminate freedom from the peninsula.
Florence was the first victim of the combination. The city was
besieged and taken by the Emperor's troops, in compliance with
the wishes of the Pope, and the Medici, his relatives, were
restored. Francis continued war feebly until 1529, when a
peace called the "Ladies Peace" was brought about, by
negotiations between the French King's mother and the
Emperor's aunt. This was practically the end of the long
French wars in Italy.

Germany.

Such were the events which, in different quarters of the
world, diverted the attention of the Emperor during several
years from Luther and the Reformation in Germany. The
religious movement in those years had been making a steady
advance. Yet its enemies gained control of another Diet held
at Spires in 1529 and reversed the ordinance of the Diet of
1526, by which each state had been left free to deal in its
own manner with the edict of Worms. Against this action of the
Diet, the Lutheran princes and the representatives of the
Lutheran towns entered their solemn protest, and so acquired
the name, "Protestants," which became in time the accepted and
adopted name of all, in most parts of the world, who withdrew
from the Roman communion.

The Peasants' War and the Anabaptists.

Before this time, the Reform had passed through serious
trials, coming from excesses in the very spirit out of which
itself had risen and to which it gave encouragement. The long
suffering, much oppressed peasantry of Germany, who had found
bishops as pitiless extortioners as lords, caught eagerly at a
hope of relief from the overthrow of the ancient Church.
Several times within the preceding half-century they had risen
in formidable revolts, with a peasants' clog, or bundschuh for
their banner. In 1525 fresh risings occurred in Swabia,
Franconia, Alsace, Lorraine, Bavaria, Thuringia and elsewhere,
and a great Peasants' War raged for months, with ferocity and
brutality on both sides. The number who perished in the war is
estimated at 100,000. The demands made by the peasants were for
measures of the simplest justice—for the poorest rights and
privileges in life. But their cause was taken up by
half-crazed religious fanatics, who became in some parts their
leaders, and such a character was given to it that reasonable
reformers were justified, perhaps, in setting themselves
sternly against it. The wildest prophet of the outbreak was
one Thomas Münzer, a precursor of the frenzied sect of the
Anabaptists. Münzer perished in the wreck of the peasants'
revolt; but some of his disciples, who fled into Westphalia
and the Netherlands, made converts so rapidly in the town of
Münster that in 1535 they controlled the city, expelled every
inhabitant who would not join their communion, elected and
crowned a king, and exhibited a madness in their proceedings
that is hardly equalled in history. The experience at Münster
may reasonably be thought to have proved the soundness of
Luther's judgment in refusing countenance to the cause of the
oppressed peasants when they rebelled.

At all events, his opposition to them was hard and bitter. And
it has been remarked that what may be called Luther's
political position in Germany had become by this time quite
changed. "Instead of the man of the people, Luther became the
man of the princes; the mutual confidence between him and the
masses, which had supported the first faltering steps of the
movement, was broken; the democratic element was supplanted by
the aristocratic; and the Reformation, which at first had
promised to lead to a great national democracy, ended in
establishing the territorial supremacy of the German princes.
… The Reformation was gradually assuming a more secular
character, and leading to great political combinations"
(Dyer).

Progress of Lutheranism in Germany.

By the year 1530, the Emperor Charles was prepared to give
more attention to affairs in Germany and to gratify his
animosity towards the movement of Reformation. He had
effectually beaten his rival, the King of France, had
established his supremacy in Italy, had humbled the Pope, and
was quite willing to be the zealous champion of a submissive
Church. His brother Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, had
secured, against much opposition, both the Hungarian and the
Bohemian crowns, and so firmly that neither was ever again
wrested from his family, though they continued for some time
to be nominally elective. The dominions of Ferdinand had
suffered a great Turkish invasion, in 1529, under the Sultan
Solyman, who penetrated even to Vienna and besieged the city,
but without success, losing heavily in his retreat.

In May, 1530, Charles re-entered Germany from Italy. The
following month he opened the sitting of the Diet, which had
been convened at Augsburg. His first act at Augsburg was to
summon the protesting princes, of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg,
and other states, before him and to signify to them his
imperial command that the toleration of Lutheranism in their
dominions must cease. He expected the mandate to suffice; when
he found it ineffectual, he required an abstract of the new
religions doctrines to be laid before him. This was prepared
by Melancthon, and, afterwards known as the Confession of
Augsburg, became the Lutheran standard of faith.
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The Catholic theologians prepared a reply to it, and both were
submitted to the Emperor. He made some attempt to bring about
a compromise of the differences, but he demanded of the
Protestants that they should submit themselves to the Pope,
pending the final decisions of a proposed general Council of
the Church. When this was refused, the Diet formally condemned
their doctrines and required them to reunite themselves with
the Catholic Church before the 15th of April following. The
Emperor, in November, issued a decree accordingly, renewing
the Edict of Worms and commanding its enforcement.

The Protestant princes, thus threatened, assembled in
conference at Schmalkald at Christmas, 1530, and there
organized their famous armed league. But fresh preparations
for war by the Turk now compelled Charles to make terms with
his Lutheran subjects. They refused to give any assistance to
Austria or Hungary against the Sultan, while threatened by the
Augsburg decree. The gravity of the danger forced a concession
to them, and by the Peace of Nuremberg (1532) it was agreed
that the Protestants should have freedom of worship until the
next Diet should meet, or a General Council should be held.
This peace was several times renewed, and there were ten years
of quiet under it, in Germany, during which time the cause of
Protestantism made rapid advances. By the year 1540, it had
established an ascendancy in Würtemberg, among the states of
the South, and in the imperial cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg,
Ulm, Constance, and Strasburg. Its doctrines had been adopted
by "the whole of central Germany, Thuringia, Saxony, Hesse,
part of Brunswick, and the territory of the Guelphs; in the
north by the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and
Naumburg … ; by East Friesland, the Hanse Towns, Holstein
and Schleswig, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Anhalt, Silesia, the
Saxon states, Brandenburg, and Prussia. Of the larger states
that were closed against it there remained only Austria,
Bavaria, the Palatinate and the Rhenish Electorates"
(Hausser). In 1542, Duke Henry of Brunswick, the last of the
North German princes who adhered to the Papal Church, was
expelled from his duchy and Protestantism established. About
the same time the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne announced his
conviction of the truth of the Protestant doctrines.

The Schmalkaldic War.

Charles was still too much involved in foreign wars to venture
upon a struggle with the Lutherans; but a few years more
sufficed to free his hands. The Treaty of Crespy, in 1544,
ended his last conflict with Francis I. In the same year, Pope
Paul III. summoned the long promised General Council of the
Church to meet at Trent the following spring—by which
appointment a term was put to the toleration conceded in the
Peace of Nuremberg. The Protestants, though greatly increased
in numbers, were now less united than at the time of the
formation of the Schmalkaldic League. There was much division
among the leading princes. They yielded no longer to the
influence of their wisest and ablest chief, Philip of Hesse.
Luther, whose counsels had always been for peace, approached
his end, and died in 1546. The circumstances were favorable to
the Emperor, when he determined to put a stop to the
Reformation by force. He secured an important ally in the very
heart of Protestant Germany, winning over to his side the
selfish schemer, Duke Maurice of Saxony—now the head of the
Albertine branch of the Saxon house. In 1546 he felt prepared
and war began. The successes were all on the imperial side.
There was no energy, no unity, no forethoughtfulness of plan,
among the Lutherans. The Elector, John Frederick, of Saxony,
and Philip of Hesse, both fell into the Emperor's hands and
were barbarously imprisoned. The former was compelled to
resign his Electorate, and it was conferred upon the renegade
Duke Maurice. Philip was kept in vile places of confinement
and inhumanly treated for years. The Protestants of Germany
were entirely beaten down, for the time being, and the Emperor
imposed upon them in 1548 a confession of faith called "the
Interim," the chief missionaries of which were the Spanish
soldiers whom he had brought into the country. But if the
Lutherans had suffered themselves to be overcome, they were
not ready to be trodden upon in so despotic a manner. Even
Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, recoiled from the tyranny
which Charles sought to establish, while he resented the
inhuman treatment of Philip of Hesse, who was his
father-in-law. He headed a new league, therefore, which was
formed against the Emperor, and which entered into a secret
alliance with Henry II. of France (Francis I. having died in
1547). Charles was taken by surprise when the revolt broke
out, in 1552, and barely escaped capture. The operations of
Maurice were vigorous and ably conducted, and in a few weeks
the Protestants had recovered all the ground lost in 1546-7;
while the French had improved the opportunity to seize the
three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The ultimate result
was the so-called "Religious Peace of Augsburg," concluded in
1555, which gave religious freedom to the ruling princes of
Germany, but none whatever to the people. It put the two
religions on the same footing, but it was simply a footing of
equal intolerance. Each ruler had the right to choose his own
creed, and to impose it arbitrarily upon his subjects if he
saw fit to do so. As a practical consequence, the final
division of Germany between Protestantism and Catholicism was
substantially determined by the princes and not by the people.

The humiliating failure of Charles V. to crush the Reformation
in Germany was no doubt prominent among the experiences which
sickened him of the imperial office and determined him to
abdicate the throne, which he did in the autumn of 1556.

Reformation in Switzerland.

A generation had now passed since the Lutheran movement of
Reformation was begun in Germany, and, within that time, not
only had the wave of influence from Wittenberg swept over all
western Europe, but other reformers had risen independently
and contemporaneously, or nearly so, in other countries, and
had co-operated powerfully in making the movement general. The
earliest of these was the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, who
began preaching against indulgences and other flagrant abuses
in the Church, at Zurich, in 1519, the same year in which
Luther opened his attack. The effect of his preaching was so
great that Zurich, four years later, had practically separated
itself from the Roman Church.
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From that beginning the Reformation spread so rapidly that in
half-a-dozen years it had mastered most of the Cantons of
Switzerland outside of the five Forest Cantons, where
Catholicism held its ground with stubbornness. The two
religions were then represented by two parties, which absorbed
in themselves all the political as well as the religious
questions of the day, and which speedily came to blows. The
Catholics allied themselves with Ferdinand of Austria, and the
Protestants with several of the imperial cities of Germany.
But such an union between the Swiss and the German Protestants
as seemed plainly desirable was prevented; mainly, by the
dictatorial obstinacy of Luther. Zwingli's reforming ideas
were broader, and at the same time more radical, than
Luther's, and the latter opposed them with irreconcilable
hostility. He still held with the Catholics to the doctrine of
transubstantiation, which the Swiss reformer rejected. Hence
Zwingli was no less a heretic in Luther's eyes than in the
eyes of the pope, and the anathemas launched against him from
Wittenberg were hardly less thunderous than those from Rome.
So the two contemporaneous reformation movements, German and
Swiss, were held apart from one another, and went on side by
side, with little help or sympathy from one another. In 1531
the Forest Cantons attacked and defeated the men of Zurich,
and Zwingli was slain in the battle. Peace was then concluded
on terms which left each canton free to establish its own
creed, and each congregation free to do the same in the common
territories of the confederation.

Reformation in France.

In France, the freer ideas of Christianity—the ideas less
servile to tradition and to Rome—that were in the upper air
of European culture when the sixteenth century began, had
found some expression even before Luther spoke. The influence
of the new classical learning, and of the "humanists" who
imbibed its spirit, tended to that liberation of the mind, and
was felt in the greatest center of the learning of the time,
the University of Paris. But not sufficiently to overcome the
conservatism of the Sorbonne—the theological faculty of the
University; for Luther's writings were solemnly condemned and
burned by it in 1521, and a persecution of those inclined
toward the new doctrines was early begun. Francis I., in whose
careless and coarse nature there was some taste for letters and
learning, as well as for art, and who patronized in an idle
way the Renaissance movements of his reign, seemed disposed at
the beginning to be friendly to the religious Reformers. But
he was too shallow a creature, and too profoundly unprincipled
and false, to stand firmly in any cause of righteousness, and
face such a power as that of Rome. His nobler sister, Margaret
of Angoulême, who embraced the reformed doctrines with
conviction, exerted a strong influence upon the king in their
favor while she was by his side; but after her marriage to
Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, and after Francis had
suffered defeat and shame in his war with Charles V., he was
ready to make himself the servant of the Papacy for whatever
it willed against his Protestant subjects, in order to have
its alliance and support. So the persecution grew steadily
more fierce, more systematic, and more determined, as the
spirit of the Reformation spread more widely through the
kingdom.

Calvin at Geneva.

One of the consequences of the persecution was the flight from
France, in 1534, of John Calvin, who subsequently became the
founder and the exponent of a system of Protestant theology
which obtained wider acceptance in Europe than that of Luther.
All minor differences were practically merged in the great
division between these two theologies—the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic—which split the Reformation in twain. After two
years of wandering, Calvin settled in the free city of Geneva,
where his influence very soon rose to so extraordinary a
height that he transformed the commonwealth and ruled it,
unselfishly, and in perfect piety, but with iron-handed
despotism, for a quarter of a century.

The French Court.