Martin Luther and the reformation in Germany until the close of the Diet of Worms

Preface

Feom the author's Introduction, in which he describes the scope of his projected History of the Reformation in Germany, it will be seen that this volume is but a first instalment of a larger work. Happily the volume is, however, anything but an unfinished fragment. It was not only left by the writer ready for the press, but it brings its story down to the close of the first great period of the German Eeformation. When the Diet of Worms broke up, German Protestantism had been finally and fully inaugurated, and its central figure, Martin Luther, had reached the summit of his heroism and his revolt.

My editorial duties have been hardly more than to see through the press a singularly and characteristically perfect manuscript ; and they have been lightened by the faithful care with which Mrs. Beard and her son, Mr. Lewis Beard, B.A., have compared manuscript and proof. I have considered it needful, in order to guard against accidental error, to exercise a general supervision of the narrative, to compare quotations with the original passages, and to verify references. No alterations have been introduced into the text or the notes, except where an obvious lapsus calami had crept in, which, however, thanks to the author's extreme accuracy, has happened but very occasionally. Here and there in the notes a reference to books or articles published since the manuscript was finished has been added. For the title of the volume, the headings of the chapters and the pages, and the list of tlie ])rinci]ial authorities and editions used by the autlior, I am responsilile ; and for the Index, Mr. Lewis Beard.

PREFACE

From the list of authorities and from the notes it will be seen that Dr. Charles Beard kept pace to the very last with the latest research in a field which has been thoroughly upturned by the critical industry of such specialists as Seidemann, Kostlin, Kolde, Knaake, Kawerau, and their fellowlabourers. And it may not be out of place to remark that Dr. Julius Kostlin's Life of Luther, with others that have followed it, placed all preceding lives of the Eeformer in the class of antiquated literature, in point of historical accuracy and thoroughness.

Of the mingled feelings with which I have worked, all readers of the book will, I believe, share those of thankfulness for what is here finished, and of regret for what has been lost in the volumes which remain unwritten. It is much to have the great story of the successful launching of the German Eeformation told by one who was so singularly qualified to tell it well. Would that his pen had been permitted to trace the further development of the movement, and to follow the lives of its prominent representatives until their work was done !

To his Hibbert Lectures the author prefixed a motto, taken from Lessing, and I cannot resist the temptation to append here a passage from Goethe, which, like that from Lessing, seems to me to breathe the spirit that inspired all Dr. Charles Beard's studies in this great period of history : —

J. FEEDEEICK SMITH.

Clifton, Bristol, July 1889.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction . . . . . . . 1

CHAPTER I Political Condition of the Empire .... 5

CHAPTEE II

The Religious Life of Germany . . . ' . 24 *

CHAPTEE HI The Renaissance in Germany . . . .62

CHAPTEE IV

Luther's Life prior to his Revolt . . . .116

CHAPTEE V Luther's Ninety-five Theses ..... 200 ^

CHAPTEE VI The Year 1519 : Friends and Foes .... 259

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII

PAGE

The Year 1520 : Luther's Appeal to the Nation . . 319

CHAPTER VIH i1

Luther and the Theology of Rome. . . . 379 'P^

CHAPTER IX

The Diet op Worms ...... 406

PRIXCIPAL AUTHORITIES WITH THE ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THIS YOLUiAIE

Luther's Collected "Works —

1. The Frankfurt and Erlangen edition.

Erl. D. S. (a) German: vols. i.-xxvi, 2d ed. 1862-1885.

vols, xxvii.-lxvii. 1st ed. 1853-1857.

Erl. 0pp. (IS) Latin: a. Exegetica, vols, i.-xxviii. 1829-1886.

Erl. Ep. Gal. (3. In Epist. Gal. vols, i.-iii. 1843-1844.

Erl. 0pp. V. a. y. 0pp. Varii Argument i, vols, i.-vii. 1865-

1873.

JVeimar ed. 2. The Weimar Critical Edition, in chronological order, now in course of publication, vols, i.-iv. vi. 1883- 1888.

TValch. 3. The edition of J. G. Walch in 24 vols. 4to, Ilalk-,

1737-1753.

Luther's Letters —

De TFette. 1. Dr. Martin Luther's Briefe gesammelt von "W. i\I. L. De vol. vi. edited by Seidemann, 185G.

Seidemann. 2. Seidemann, Lutherbriefe, 1859.

Burkhardt. 3. Dr. M. Luther's Briefwechsel, von C. A. H. Burkhardt, 1866.

Enders. 4. Dr.' Martin Luther's Briefwechsel, von E. L. Enders,

vols, i.-ii. 1884-1887 (containing letters from and to Luther, with some others, of the years 1507-1520).

Luther's Table Talk —

T. T. 1. German: edited by Furstemann and Bindseil, vols, i.-iv.

1844-1848.

Coll 2. Latin: D. Marthii Lutheri Colloquia edita al) II. E.

Bindseil, vols, i.-iii. 1863-1866.

xii PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES USED IN THIS VOLUME

Album Academiae Vitebergensis, 1502-1540, ed. Forsteniann, 1841. Historia Joannis Cochlaei de Actis et Scriptis, M. Lutheri, etc., Coloniae,

1568.

Corpus Eeformatorum, torn, i.-xxviii., sive Melanthonis Pli. Opera quae

supersunt omnia, ed. Bretschneider et Bindseil (Historia de vita

et actis D. Martini Lutlieri conscripta a Pliilippo Melantlione

being in torn. vi.).

Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, Lugd. Bat. 1703-1706, vols, i.-xi. Forsteniann — Neues Urkundenbuch zur Geschiclite der Evangelischen

Kirchen-Reformation, vol. i. 1842.

Herzog — Real-Encyklopaedie fiir protestantische Theologie und Kircbe,

vols. i.-v. 1859-1861 ; U. H. Operum Supplementum, vols. i. ii.

1864-1870.

1483-1517, 3 vols. 1846-1847, von Karl Jlirgens. Kampschulte — Die Universitat Erfurt in ibrem Verbaltnisse zu dem

Humanismus und der Reformation, vol. i. 1858, voL ii. 1860. Kolde — Martin Lutber, Eine Biograpbie, von Tbeodor Kolde, Liefe-

rungen, 1-3, 1884 (brings tlie life down to end of Diet of

Worms).

Die deutscbe Augustiner-Congregation und Jobann von Stau-

pitz, von T. Kolde, 1879.

Lutber's Stellung zu Concil u. Kircbe bis zum 1521, von T. Kolde, 1876.

Kostlin — Martin Lutber, sein Leben und seine Schriften, 2 vols. 1875;

2d and 3d ed. 1883.

Lauterbacb's Tagebucb auf das Jabr 1538, ed. Seidemann, 1872. Liber Decanorum Facultatis Tbeologicae Academiae Vitebergensis, ed.

by Forsteniann, 1838.

Lingke— Dr. M. Lutber's merkwiirdige Reisegescbicbte, etc., von J.

T. Lingke, 1769.

von V. E. Loscbern, vol. i. (tbe year 1517), vol. ii. (tbe year

Matbesius — Historien von D. M. Lutber's Anfang, etc., Niirnberg, 1567. Myconius — Frid. Myconii Hist. Reformationis, 1518-1542, ed. by

Cyprian, 1715.

PRLXCIPAL AUTHORITIES USED IX THIS VOLUME xiii

u. seine Zeit, berausgegeben von Xeiulecker, 1850. Riederer — (1) Beitrag zu den Reformationsnikunden, etc., 1762.

(2) Nacbrichten zur Kircbengescbielitt- und Biicliergescbicbte, 8 vols, in 4, 1764-1767.

Scbeurl — Christopb Scbeurl's Briefbuch, berausgegeben von F. v. So(K-n

und J. K. F. Knaake, 2 vols. 1867-1872.

ed. 2da, Lips. 1694, folio.

Seidemann, J. R. — Die Leipziger Disputation, 1843. Spalatin — G. Spalatini Annales Reformationis, apud Menckenii Scriptores rerum German. 1728-1729, vol. ii.

Strobel — Beitrjige zur Literatur besonders des xvi. Jabrb. 4 pis. in 2 vols. 1784-1787.

Neue Beitrage, etc., 5 vols. 1790-1794.

Tentzel — Historiscbe Bericbt von Anfang, etc. der Reformation Lutberi, 2 vols. 1718.

Tentzelii Supplementum Hist. Gotbanae, primum C. Mutiani Rufi Epistolas complectens, Jenae, 1701. UUmann — Reformatoren vor der Reformation, von Dr. Carl Ullmann,

2d ed. 2 vols. 1866.

Weissenborn, J, C. H. — Acten der Erfurter Universitiit, pts. i. and ii. 1881-1884.

N

Introduction

There are two points of view from which the Eeformation of the sixteenth century may be regarded. Looked at from the first, it appears to be what its name imports — an effort to reclaim the Christian Church from inveterate doctrinal and practical corruption to a more primitive conception of truth and a higher standard of purity. In the practical or disciplinary sense the Latin Church had made repeated efforts to reform itself Monasticism, both in its original foundation and in its repeated revivals, was such an effort. An organised and general attempt at reformation was the object of the Councils of Pisa, Constanz, and Basel at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The corruption of Christianity, in the forms in wliich it was commonly presented to the people, threw mystics back upon the ideas which lie at the basis of all religion, and gave rise to sects, which lived a hidden life, beneath the surface of mediaeval society. A disciplinary reformation was carried into effect by Ferdinand and Isabella, in Castile and Arragon, at the end of the fifteenth century, and was the object of the Fifth Lateran Council, held at Eome in 1512-1517. In Spain, in France, in Germany, in England the weaknesses of the existing system were strongly felt, and demands were made for reform, which Eome, then under the rule of profligate Popes, resisted or evaded. But this movement was taken out of the hands of the Church by Luther. Having fought his own way to what would now be called a Protestant conception of spiritual religion, though without becoming conscious of his divergence from Catholic standards, he first attacked the abuses connected witli the sale of indulgences, and then was led on, step by step, to r.

INTRODUCTION an assault upon the whole position of the Church. His doctrine of the jauthority of Scripture undermined that of the authority of the Church ; his theory of the priesthood of the believer, the whole sacerdotal and sacramental system. The result was, within certain territorial limits, the foundation of Churches which not only separated themselves from allegiance to the Pope, but established an administration of Christianity based upon ideas of religion other than those which obtained within the Catholic pale. The Protestant Eeformation was thus, in its essence, doctrinal ; it was the substitution of one series of conceptions of Christianity for another : and it reformed the practical abuses peculiar to Catholicism by destroying the system upon which they were an excrescence. But while, at the Diet of Augsburg, and on every similar occasion, the Catholic Church refused to make the sHghtest doctrinal concession to the dissidents, the demand for disciphnary reform was never silent within her borders : and the Council of Trent, which settled the Creed of the Church upon the old lines, in matters of administration, opened a new era. The necessity of recovering lost ground from a victorious Protestantism, the election to the Papal Chair of a series of austere Pontiffs, the foundation of the Society of Jesus and other orders animated by a spirit of stern and enthusiastic piety, produced the Counter-Eeformation. The doctrinal position of the Latin Church remained unchanged, but it was purged of its worst practical scandals.

But this summary does not cover all the facts of the case, or indicate their wider relations. Wliy were the efforts of the Church to reform itself ineffectual ? It may be said that monasticism, in its attempt to lift humanity to an unreal and. impossible height of perfectness, always carries within itself the seeds of failure ; that reformation by General Councils broke down, because the moral energy of the few could not contend successfully against the selfishness and the worldliness of the many ; that mystic religion, almost always pure and good, cannot spread itself beyond the few souls which have a natural affinity for it. But the characteristic ideas of the Eeformation were older than Luther ; Wiclif had preached them in England, Hus in Bohemia : a series of Catholic theologians in Germany had attacked indulgences, and expounded justification by faith

INTRODUCTION ill terms almost identical with those afterwards employed by the Saxon reformer. Why was no general effect produced ? The answer is, that the Eeforniation in^jts wider aspects is part of that^ greater moyemeiit o^the human mind, Jciio^n_as~ tiie Eenaissancfi ; a rebirth, due to the revived study of classical literature and philosophy ; a rebellion against mediaeval systems of thought, which has issued in modern science and speculation. Without the fresh intellectual activity produced by this movement, and augmented in the fifteenth century b\' the invention of the art of printing. Luthej. miglitTiave_beei^_j^ ineffectual ^s Wiclif was. B^it Jjie time was ripe for change ; the seed was'^cas^ into the ground at the right inoinent.'"'~lNevertheless, the Lutheran soon separated itself from the purely Humanist movement, and has never since been fully reconciled with it: Lutheranism first, and Calvinism afterwards developed into a Protestant scholasticism, only less fatal to the unrestrictetl movement of the human mind than that of the Middle Ages. At^the same time, on other than Church ground, the tide of free speculation has steadily risen, nor, for the last hundred years, have the gradually decaying bulwarks of dogma been able to oppose any effectual resistance to it. From this point of view,[the Reformation was the manifestation of the spirit of the Eenaissance in the realm of religion ; and Kant, Niebuhr, Ewald, Darwin, are, each on his own line of affiliation, heirs of Luther.

In the following pages I propose to tell the story of the German Reformation from the publication of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517 to the death of Melanchthon in 15G0. Even this, however, is a wider subject than I can pretend to treat with equal minuteness in all its parts ; the centre point of my narrative will be Saxony, and its principal personages, the Reformers of Wittenberg, with those whom an irresistil)le attraction drew within their orbit. I shall thus gTasp the advantage of a story alive with a single interest, and confined within manageable limits ; while at the same time opportunity will be given of illustrating the principles wliich animated the general movement of reform in Europe. But before I can begin this task, a large preparation must be made. I must attempt to describe the political condition of the Empire at tlie

INTRODUCTION beginning of the sixteenth century ; to combine into a single picture the various elements of the religious life of Germany about the same period ; to follow the story of the revival of classical literature in Germany, and then to analyse the intellectual soil into which the germinal ideas of the Eeformation were cast ; and in the last place, to tell the story of Luther's life up to the moment of his rebellion against the Church, and to trace his characteristic ideas to their origin in his own inward pains and conflicts. These, then, will be the subjects of four introductory chapters. Should any reader complain that he is long held back from the main interest of the book, let him remember that^jio great and general movement of the human mind can be understood without careful analysis of the forces wliich have combined to produce it, and that every stage of intellectual progress presupposes another out of which it has been evolved. The development of human affairs is one continuous web, in which no real breaks answer to the artificial periods into which we divide history. |

CHAPTEE I

POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIEE

The political condition of Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century was due to forces which, although they had been long in operation, had not yet wholly spent themselves. The Carolingian kingdom of the Franks, which had lieen invested with the succession to the Eoman Empire, and had renewed its Imperial character under Otho the Great, was slowly dissolving into a confederacy of States, spiritual and civil, of which the nominal head, in dignity the chief of earthly monarchs, had little power except such as his own hereditary possessions conferred upon him. We find ourselves at a point midway between the comparatively homogeneous kingdom of Charlemagne and the phantom Empire which in 1815 still gave a title to the royal house of Austria. And the disintegration of Germany, at the moment wliicli we are considering, stood in strong contrast to processes of national consolidation which were going on over the rest of Europe. The task of uniting Italy was indeed left for the nineteenth century to accomplish ; but Spain had just been constituted by the union of Arragon and Castile under Ferdinand and Isabella : England, gathering strength after the exhaustion caused by the Wars of the Eoses, was fast recovering a national consciousness : the breaking up of the Burgundian kingdom, and the absorption of Brittany in the dominions of the House of Valois, gave France a more solid power than it had ever before possessed. Germany alone showed an irresistible tendency to separate into fragments. Every year the centrifugal force grew stronger, the common bond of union weaker, Nothing ever occurred which arrested for more than a moment the fading of Imperial rights into imposing unreality : everything helped the Electorates, the Principalities, the Dukedoms, on their way to political independence.

/ I JThe theory of the Empire had, at no moment of medieval Hiistory, been fully carried into practice. According to it the Emperor was the head of the civil as the Pope of the spiritual order. They held the two swords which divided all the power of the world between them : another common metaphor described them as the sun and moon of the intellectual sky. The Emperor claimed more than a titular supremacy over other monarchs : he had inherited the privileges and pretensions of the successors of Augustus. But England and the kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula went on their way in practical independence of him, while he was brought into contact with the growing French kingdom which had its capital at Paris, chiefly on the frontier of Burgundy and Flanders. In Italy, on the contrary, he was always busy. There he was a living force. He went to Kome to be crowned. He was the titular king of the Romans, a monarch often distant and disregarded, but still the symbol of the power which had once made Pome the capital of the civilised earth. In all the throes of the Italian Pepublics he stood for the general as contrasted with the local order of things, for the State in opposition to the Church. Every now and then an Emperor made the attempt to convert his theoretical into a real supremacy over Italy, but could never long hold his. ground : and the chief result was to keep old claims alive in men's minds, and to prepare the way for a fresh assertion of them. But Guelph and Ghibelline were words that represented a very real opposition of political feeling ; and the dream that Dante dreamed of an Imperial monarchy, which, in the exercise of its just rights, should heal the woes of Italy by giving it a well-ordered government, shows how strong a hold the idea of the Empire had upon men's minds. But before the beginning of the sixteenth century all this had faded away, and Italy had become only the battleground on which the rival ambitions of France and Germany contended for the mastery.

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY

The struggle of the Empire for a territorial hold on Italy was, however, complicated with another, wider in extent and of deeper significance. The relations of the Empire with the Papacy were always peculiarly close. Pipin twice delivered Eome from the Lombards, and was rewarded with the title of Patrician. The coronation of Charles by Leo III (a.d. 800) is " the central event of the Middle Ages." -^ Charles's conquests in Northern and North -Eastern Germany had been made in the name of Christianity : conversion or slaughter was the alternative practically offered to the Saxons. Almost for the first time in the history of Christianity, the civil and the spiritual power are manifestly and happily in accord : the Church is secure under the protection of the Prankish swords, the State borrows the authority, and uses the instruments of the Church. But the relation was changed when, in 962, Otho came down from the Alps with a victorious army, and was crowned Emperor at Ptome by John XII. This time it was the State imposing itself upon the Church. " The Pope owned himself a subject ; and the citizens swore for the future to elect no Pope without Otho's consent." ^ It was one of the moments at wliich the Papacy, both politically and morally, was at the lowest ebb ; and Popes, set up and deposed by rival factions, and each equally unworthy of rule, obeyed the Emperor's nod.

A little more than a hundred years brings us from John XII to Gregory VII, and the same interval from Otho the Great to Henry IV. We pass from the Emperor receiving an oath of allegiance from the Pope, to the Emperor waiting in the snow, in the castle-yard of Canossa, till the Pope should be willing to see and to absolve a penitent. Even this, however, is hardly the lowest point of submission to which the spiritual reduced the temporal power ; that was reached when, before the porch of St. Mark's at Venice, Frederic Barbarossa humbly bowed before Alexander III. The first thing that Henry needed to help him in his contests with his rebellious subjects was the removal of the ban of excommunication, and that once extorted by submission, he flew back to Germany to continue the struggle with vassals and Pope alike. But in the person

^ Bryce, Holy Rovuin Empire, 3d ed. p. 50. - Ibid. p. 88.

of Frederic the Empire, almost at its strongest, came into conflict with the Papacy, and deliberately confessed itself vanquished. It is not necessary in this connection to tell the story, how the edifice of Papal pretensions was gradually built up on the foundation of the pseudo-Isidorian decretals, by astute and resolute Popes ; how it was strengthened by the enforcement of clerical celibacy and the influence of the monastic orders ; how fortified by men's belief in the unity of the Church and the need of a supreme court of appeal in rnatters political as well as spiritual ; and how it finally crumbled to pieces in the degradation of the captivity of Avignon, and the scandal of the Schism. To do so, would be to undertake the task of epitomising the history of mediaeval Europe. The main point we have at present to notice is that in the enforcement of Imperial claims, made real by able and powerful monarchs, reduced to a vanishing point under weak and irresolute ones, the opportunity was missed of consohdating Germany into a homogeneous kingdom. Wlien the Papacy of Gregory VII and Innocent III disappeared from the scene, to give place to that of men like Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, whose base ambition was bounded by the erection of Itahan principalities for their sons and nephews, Frederic III and Maximilian were struggling against the impotence of the Empire. And when in the person of Charles V the Empire seemed all at once to rise to its old predominance in Europe, it was only because tlie Emperor was the hereditary ruler of richer and more powerful States than had ever before been united under one sceptre. Germany, the ancient seat of Empire, was much more his weakness than his strength.

To a considerable extent, the fact that the German monarchy was not hereditary but elective, worked in the same direction. At first sight it might seem as if the periodical selection of the ablest man would tend to establish monarchy on a more stable basis than the chances of hereditary descent. In truth, the two principles were contending for the mastery, with the result, until the claims to Empire of the House of Hapsburg were finally recognised, of arraying two or three great families one agamst the other, and so giving the everwatchful Pope his opportunity of interference and aggression.

I

I GROWING INDEPENDENCE OF THE STATES 9

A weak liereilitaiy monarch has at least this advantage over a chosen king who is otherwise no fitter for rule than himself, that his claim to the throne is unquestioned. So that whatever its other wrongs and sorrows, his kingdom escapes the miseries which arise out of a disputed succession. And while an hereditary king receives his office from his ancestors with its privileges unimpaired, and is under no temptation to impair them, an elective monarch usually begins by buying his own election at the cost of parting with power, and goes on to secure in the same way the supremacy of his house. Then there is the tendency, only too prevailing at some periods of German history, for great feudatories to entrust supreme authority to hands which they know to be too weak to wield it, and thus to secure the growth of their own independence. Nor can anything show more clearly the change which had been fully eh'ected at the beginning of the sixteenth century than the willingness of the electors to bestow the Imperial crown on a prince who, like Charles V, might have fair ground to aspire to universal dominion. The long impotence of Frederic III, and the inability of Maximilian to carry the German States with him in his plans, either of internal organisation or foreign conquest, seem to have convinced them that their sectional independence was fully assured, and that however powerful the Emperor might be outside the Empire, he could do little to disturb the equilibrium into which it had gradually settled. The experience of the next two centuries amply justified this expectation. Germany came out of the Tliirty Years' War, the most desolating experience through which a nation ever passed, with her territorial arrangements almost unaltered. Until the new Empire effaced some at least of the old political landmarks, the reigning houses of the nineteenth century were the descendants of the Electors, Princes, Dukes who met Charles V at the Diet of Worms.

We may mark two chief epochs in this growing independence of the States. The first is that of the Pragmatic Sanctions, by which in 1220 and 1232 Frederick II granted the bishops and nobles " legal sovereignty in their own towns and territories, except when the Emperor was present." ^ It is lo POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE EMPIRE chap.

obvious that this was not so much a fresh Imperial grant as a necessary confirmation of rights which had been long growing up, and which it was easier to define than to deny. The second is the Golden Bull of 1356, in which Charles IV settled the Electoral College, to which the choice of the Emperor was thenceforth to be entrusted. Here again, the measure was one which rather defined old and customary than created new rights. The College was to consist of seven persons ; and seven persons are mentioned in a letter of Pope Urban IV, of the date of 1265, as having the right of choosing the King of the Eomans. These seven are the three great Archbishops of Mainz, Koln, and Trier ; while the other four must originally have been the Dukes of the chief tribes which composed the German nation : Franks, Swabians, Saxons, and Bavarians. Eetaining the ecclesiastical electors, among whom the Archbishop of Mainz was first in rank, Charles IV gave the four other places in the College to Bohemia, the Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg. With subsequent changes and additions we have here nothing to do ; the order established by Charles IV remained unbroken till the Thirty Years' War. The result of this legislation was, in the first instance, the introduction of order into the discharge of an important national function ; but it also invested the seven electors with something of the sacrosanct character which belonged to the Empire, and at the same time largely recognised their independence within their own dominions. It established the principle of hereditary succession in the lay electorates ; gave all the electors the right of coining money and levying taxes ; confirmed the authority and independence of their courts of justice; and placed their persons under the protection of the law of treason. It was another important step in the process which converted Germany from a monarchy into a confederation of States.

A peculiar element was, however, introduced into the political development of Germany by the fact that so many of the feudatories, who were always struggling towards a larger measure of independence, were ecclesiastical. A glance at the map ^ shows that at the beginning of the sixteenth century

^ See Spruner-Menke, jSawdfti!Z«s/M?v vcueren Zeit. Map 43: Deutschlandim die Geschichte des Mittelalters und dcr Zeitraum der Eeformation.

THE POWER OF THE CHURCH one-fourth, perhaps one-third of the country was in the hands of the Church. On the extreme north-east had once been the wide domains of the Teutonic Knights, which, having been seized in 1466 by the kingdom of Poland, afterwards fell in great part to the House of Brandenburg. But on the northwest still stretched in continuous line the dioceses of Bremen, Utrecht, Miinster, and Paderborn. The bishopric of Liege occupied a not inconsiderable portion of the Netherlands, while those of Metz and Strassburg covered the French frontier. The great electoral archbishoprics of Koln, Trier, and ]\Iainz ran along the course of the Rhine. In Central Germany, Hildesheim, Halterstadt, Magdeburg, Wlirzburg, and Bamberg were all ecclesiastical States, while Salzburg and Trent carried the line of clerical fortresses down to the confines of Italy. Wherever the Diet met, three out of the seven electors, who made up the first line of the political hierarchy, were ecclesiastics, while the great bishops successfully held their own with the crowd of minor potentates. This state of things had its origin in the circumstances under which the power of the Prankish kings was first acquired and consolidated. Ecclesiastical went hand in hand with civil organisation. Under Charles Martel and his successors, Boniface, who had received episcopal consecration from Gregory II, at once gave form and order to the Church in Germany, and united it in the firmest bonds of obedience to the Papacy. When Charlemagne pushed the confines of his kingdom into the barbarous regions of the north-east, his subjection of the Saxons was a victory of Christianity over heathenism, and the newly-acquired territory was at once divided into dioceses. Otho pursued the same policy : he confirmed the conquests which his father had made on the Elbe and the Saale by the erection of bishoprics, and when he carried his own victorious arms beyond the former river, he founded the dioceses which he afterwards united under the primacy of Magdeburg.-^ It is not difficult to see how, in these outposts of civilisation, the bishops, who were usually the best representatives of law and order in a time of recurring confusion, gradually arrogated to themselves rights and powers usually associated with sovereignty, and how the Emperor