The reformation

Contents

PAGE

Prefatory Note

CHAP. I.— The New Wine in the Old Bottles.— The Reformation Long Prepared.— Decline of the Papacy.— Growth of Christian Life.— The New National Life. France, England, Spain, Italy, Germany.— Decline of Scholasticism.— The New Learning.— Its Theory of Reform.—The New Geography.— Reform by Councils Tried. — Marsilius of Padua. — William of Occam. — Wiclif.— Huss. -The Mystics. — The Anti-Koman Sects.— The New

.Spirit of Individualism.— A Reformation Inevitable i

CHAP. II.— The Spanish Awakening.— Reform Sought by Governmental Action.— The Spanish Religious Character. —Ferdinand and Isabella.— Ximenes.— Theological Learning—The Inquisition.— Influence of the Spanish Awakening "

CHAP. III.— The Saxon Revolt.— State of Germany.— Its Divisions of Opinion.— Reuchlin.— Luther's Character.— Early Life. — The Great Question. — Luther a Monk. — Justification by Faith Alone. — Luther a Teacher.— Indulgences.—The Ninety-five Theses.— Germany Stirred.— Philip Melanchthon.— The Leipzig Disputation.— The Great Tracts of 1520.— The Pope's Bull Burned.— Worms.— Luther in Retirement.— Wittenberg in his Absence.— Luther's Forceful Return.— Spread of Lutheranism.— The Peasants' War.— Breach with Erasmus.— Luther's Marriage. — Organization of the Lutheran Churches.— The Political Situation.

— The Name, Protestant. — Protestantism Divided 7^

CHAP. IV.— The Revolt in German Switzerland.— Condition of Switzerland.-Zwingli's Early Life.— His Spiritual V

VI Contents.

Development. — The Reformation of Zurich. — Anabaptists Persecuted. — Berne and Basel Revolt from Rome. — Martin Bucer. — Zwingli's Theology. — Christ's Presence in the Supper. — Saxon and Swiss Reformers Divided. — Colloquy at Marburg. — Zwingli's Far-reaching Plans. — Civil War in Switzerland. — Zwingli's Death 147

CHAP. V. — The Lutheran Churches of Germany. — Changed Character of the Lutheran Revolt. — The Augsburg Confession. — The Schmalkaldic League. — Political Situation Favors the Protestants. — The Nuremberg Truce. — Spread of Lutheranism. — Growth of Catholic Opposition. — The Frankfort Suspension. — Reunion Efforts. — Philip's Bigamy. — The Emperor's Plans. — Luther's Death. — Moritz of Saxony. — Collapse of the Schmalkaldic League. — The Interims.— The Protestant coup d'etat. — Failure of the Emperor. — Lutheranism Wins Equal Rights. — The Peace of Augsburg. — Internal Quarrels of the Lutherans. — Melanchthon's Views. — His Last Days. — The " Rage of the Theologians." — Disastrous Effects of these Disputes 181

CHAP. VI. — Calvin and his Work. — Condition of France. — Reformation Enters Through the New Learning. — Le Fevre of Etaples. — Governmental Hostility. — French Switzerland, Farel, Viret and Froment. — State of Geneva. — It Revolts from Rome. — Calvin's Early Life and Education. — Conversion to Protestantism. — The Institutes. — Calvin's Theology. — Discipline. — Calvin at Geneva. — Banishment. — In Strassburg. — His Return and Rule. — The Genevan Constitution. — Contests. — -Casteilio, Bolsec and Servetus. — Calvin's Work. — Spread of His Views. — Death. — Theodore Beza 225

CHAP. VII. — The Protestant Movement Carried to Other Countries. — Condition of Scandinavia. — Sweden Becomes Lutheran. — Denmark, Norway and Iceland Lutheran.— The Reformation in Poland. — Hungary and Transylvania. — Liberal Stirrings in Spain. — The Religious Revival of Italy. — Caraffa and Contarini. — The Spanish Tjrpe of Reformation Victorious. — The Italian Anti-Trinitarians. — Socinianism. — The Netherlands. — England. — Condition of Scotland. — Protestant Beginnings. — John

Contents. vii

I'AOK

Knox. — The Scottish Revolt from Rome. — Queen Mary. — Knox's Work 277

CHAP. VIII. — The Mork Radical Reformers. — Luther, Zwingli and Calvin seem to some but half-way Reformers. — Genesis of the Radical Movements. — The Anabaptists. — Their Beliefs. — Their Wide Spread. ^-Persecution. — The Majority Orderly. — A Fanatic Element. — Hofmann. — The Miinster Tragedy. — Menno Simons Restores the Anabaptist Movement. — Franck. — Schwenckfeld. — The Spirituels. — The Family of Love. — Value of these Radical Movements 335

CHAP. IX. — The Counter-Reformation. — Reform in the Roman Church. — Aims of the Counter-Reformation. — It Gains Control of the Papacy. — Theology Revived. — New Orders and Congregations. — Awakened Spiritual Life. — Ignatius Loyola. — The .Society of Jesus. — Its Character. — Spread. — Schools. — Missions. — Xavier. — The Council of Trent. — Its Theology. — Support Given by Catholic Sovereigns.— The Roman Church Renews its Strength 356

CHAP. X. — The Struggle for Mastery. — The Changed Political Situation of 1559. — Protestantism in Peril. — The Early Huguenot Struggles in France. — The Revolt of the Netherlands. — William of Orange. — Massacre of St. Bartholomew.— The War in the Netherlands. — Further Huguenot Struggles. — Attitude of Elizabeth. — The Great Armada. — Henry IV. Reverses the Policy of France. — The Edict of Nantes. — Failure of Philip II. — The Situation in Germany. — The Thirty Years' War. — Bohemian Protestantism Crushed. — Wallenstein. — Foreign Intervention. — Gustavus Adolphus. — Richelieu. — Germany Exhausted. — The Peace of Westphalia. — The I^ines Permanently Drawn. — The Reformation in Retrospect 403

PREFATORY NOTE.

jN preparing a brief sketch of so gigantic a movement as that known as the Reformation, the main task is necessarily that of omission. Persons and facts of significance crowd upon the historian's attention. But as a selection is imperative, the writer has chosen to treat with relative fulness the initial and formative stages of the Reformation movement and the work of its few preeminent leaders. He has therefore sketched but cursorily the political struggles of the later Reformation age. Those conflicts belong, indeed, to the most picturesque episodes of European history ; but they added little to the thoughts and principles which the Reformation represented. They answered the question, how far should the sway of those principles extend.

The plan of this series of volumes provides for a separate treatment of the Anglican Reformation.

Hartford, Conn.

September i, 1900.

Chapter I. The New Wine In The Old Bottles

IREAT events are not without long antecedent causes. However unheralded they may appear to contemporary observers, in the retrospect they are seen

, to have been due in large part to

changes in knowledge, social conditions or opinions extending over a protracted sequence of years. This fact, observable regarding the epochal movements of history in general, is in a special degree characteristic of the momentous revolution^ m thought which bears the name of the Reformation Yet as in individual lives, even those of the greatest of men, it is difficult to distinguish what is due to environment and the atmosphere of the age from what is the result of forceful personality, so in the story of a movement as characterized by moulding leadership as the Reformation it is impossib e o weigh and define the exact proportions assignable to the results of the slow growth of centuries and to the influence of leaders marked by as conspicuous individuality and powerful impress as any age of the world has enjoyed. The Reformation i^^conceiv able in the form which it took, without the men

The Reformation.

who loom as heroic figures in its drama ; but the men of the Reformation could not have done their work had it not been for the long preparation of the peoples of Europe for the crisis in which they were to be the guiding spirits. With all their strength and originality, they were, nevertheless, themselves the best embodiment of the results of that preparation.

The Reformation itself was, moreover, not the beginning but the culminating stage of a great movement, of which the new political life of Europe, the unlocking of strange continents, and the revival of learning were all equally parts. Religious reform was not the blossoming but the fruitage of a general unfettering of the human mind. But as the mediaeval social system attained its highest perfection in the mediaeval Church, so the break with mediaevalism reached its intensest point of contest in the rejection of the limitations which mediaeval ecclesiastical authority had imposed ; and hence the Reformation is the crowning episode in that struggle for freedom of thought which preceded the struggle for freedom in political action, and which, however imperfectly fought out, was the great contribution of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to human progress.

The mediaeval theory of Christian society was simple, however confused the actual social state. The visible unity of the civilized world was a thought inherited from the Roman empire ; and, to the mediaeval mind, inclined to reflect only in the concrete, one which found its expression in the

The Medieval Ideal.

subjection of Christendom in its spiritual interests to a single Church, of which the papacy was the divinely established head, and in its temporal concerns to civil authority — an authority having its highest, though not its only, representative in the supposed successor to the Caesars, the occupant of the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Both were in harmonious interplay, having as their aim the temporal and eternal welfare of every inhabitant of Christendom ; but as the spiritual outweighs in importance the earthly and the temporal, so the Church is superior in its claims and authority — the great churchmen of the middle ages insisted — to the State.

These are ideals of no small grandeur. The Church to which so high a function was ascribed was a gigantic corporation whose existence was maintained by sacraments administered by a divinely empowered hierarchy in communion with a visible head. All inhabitants of Christendom were initiated by it through baptism into the Kingdom of God, of which it was the earthly embodiment ; in communion with it salvation was alone possible, and that communion was only to be maintained by participation in its sacraments, confession to its priests, and obedience to its commands. It alone joined in marriage, it alone gave honorable burial, its courts alone administered the bequests of the departed. It exacted conformity to its dogmas as to the sole possible exposition of truth ; and not only drove active dissenters out of reputable association with their fellow-men, but handed themovqrto punishments of

The Reformation.

the utmost severity, inflicted, indeed, in their extremer forms by civil authority, but at the instance of the Church. It taxed all Christendom with tithes and fees ; it limited industry by multiplied holidays ; it separated a large portion of the community from the helpful examples, companionships and restraints of married life. It laid its hand on men in their education, their reading, their amusements, their business. It touched them in all their relations, not merely in this life, but in the purgatorial sufferings of the world to come, and professed even to open or close the door of heaven itself. By its sacramental system, its celibate priesthood, and its theory of hierarchical authority, it made the ordinary lay Christian wholly dependent upon the clergy for the initiation, the upbuilding and the happy fruition of his spiritual life. It spoke with absolute authority, and its condition of salvation was essentially obedience to its teaching and its officers, who by divine appointment, as Hildebrand told William the Conqueror, were to answer for its members before the tribunal of God's judgment. To its authoritative priesthood all owed fidelity ; and it, in turn, assured all obedient sons of eternal felicity.

Nor were these conceptions of the nature and power of the Church without their great value as an educative force. The mediaeval Church, by its uniformity, its discipline, and its corporate moulding power, did a work for the crude social life that grew up on the ruins of the Roman empire or among the new peoples outside the bounds to which Roman conquest had once extended that no freer

The MedicBval Church.

conception of Christianity could have accomplished. Equally evident is it, also, that the central force in the mediaeval ecclesiastical system, the papacy, was, on the whole, the leader of Christendom from the downfall of the Roman empire at least to the thirteenth century. It sent forth or superintended missionaries in England and Germany ; it united Europe in the one great combined effort of the middle ages, the Crusades ; it afTorded the most conspicuous centre of unity for western Christendom in the divisions of feudalism. Its more gifted popes, like Gregory I., Nicholas I., Hildebrand, or Innocent III., belong to the small number of the world's great rulers whose work affects long subsequent generations ; and if the papal office was administered by no single occupant equal in genius to a Charlemagne, it may, nevertheless, be said that the papacy as a whole showed more of enlightenment, moral purpose and political wisdom than any succession of kings or emperors that mediaeval Europe knew. In spite of grave faults and periods of profound degradation, the papacy may be said to have shown itself adapted to the conditions of social and religious life prevalent in Europe certainly till the close of the Crusades. The best men of the period, like Anselm, Bernhard, or Thomas Aquinas, were its hearty supporters.

But to say that the papacy was adapted to the conditions of mediaeval Europe is not to imply that the institution was permanently illustrative of the highest conceptions of the Christian life, or even that the mediaeval idea,! of Christian society was

The Reformation.

ever approximately realized. Church and State, theoretically harmonious, were in constant struggle one with another for the mastery, usually with very earthly weapons ; and the victories of the papacy were not such as to bring to it permanent spiritual strength. If religion be broadly considered as a spiritual force controlling the lives of men rather than as bound up with a particular system of doctrine and of polity, there is no reason to suppose, as has sometimes been alleged, that the generations immediately preceding the Reformation were less moved by spiritual concerns than earlier centuries. It was as true then as it now is that religious interest is cyclic and recurrent in intensity rather than continuous, but the evidence is overwhelming that the whole mediaeval period witnessed a gradual deepening of the hold of religion on life and thought, so that in strength and power the religious life among the people of Germany in the fifteenth century, for instance, showed vast progress from the condition of things among the Franks in the eighth century. If the wider interests of religion are had in view, the period just previous to the Reformation witnessed not the lowest decline but the highest development of mediaeval Christianity — high enough to be dissatisfied with its state, to feel dimly the inadequacy of its institutions, and the need of their improvement. Yet if we consider the organized forces of Christianity, especially the hierarchical and monastic systems, no such continuous amelioration can be affirmed. On the contrary, after a period of efili-

Decline of the Papacy.

dent service, they became less and less able to minister to the needs of Christian men, partly through their own decay, and partly throu<,di their insufficiency to meet the wants of an expandin<^and less fettered religious life. The tendency of the clergy to become essentially a beaurocracy which had been manifested in some degree since the conversion of the Roman empire increased throughout the middle ages ; and with the decline of crusading zeal and its victory over the Holy Roman Empire in the thirteenth century a rapid deterioration was evident in the ideals of the papacy itself. Its claims and those of its supporters never were loftier. Augustinus Triumphus went further, it may be, than most of his contemporary upholders of the papacy would have done when, in 1324, he declared that the decisions of God and of the pope are always the same ; but an orator in the Fifth Lateran Council addressed Julius 11. as '' Tu alter Deus in terris;" and, as near to the Lutheran upheaval as 1 5 16, Leo X. solemnly reaffirmed the claim of Boniface VIII., formulated two centuries before, that not to obey the pope is to commit a souldestroying sin.

But, in spite of such declarations as have just been cited, the papacy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showed itself less deserving of obedience — in so far as obedience was due to moral leadership — than it had been in the days of Hildebrand or Urban II. The reservation of profitable ecclesiastical benefices to be filled in every land by papal appointments, and the exaction of a consid-

8 The Reformatio7i.

erable portion of the income of each new incumbent of any churchly office as a tax payable to the papal treasury, became significant features of the papal policy in the thirteenth century and grew with startling rapidity under tlie Avignon popes, flourishing even more in the exigencies of the schism, till they could hardly be distinguished from a sale of offices. The ancient system of indulgences was rapidly transformed into a means of political favoritism, and especially into a source of revenue. Papal taxes, exactions, and interferences constantly increased as the papal prerogatives were applied to the mint and cummin of ecclesiastical administration until it seemed as if the papacy itself was primarily a great taxing agency. Nor was the spiritual character of the popes in general, from the thirteenth century to the Reformation, such as to counterbalance the deteriorating tendencies just outlined. Good men there were among them, but men of impressiv^e religious influence were lacking ; while in Clement VI., John XXIII., Innocent VIII., Alexander VI., or Julius II., the papacy sank to a worldliness which placed it on a level with the worst princes of the age. And this tendency toward the secular, not to add also the immoral, increased as the Reformation era approached. The worst popes of this period of spiritual weakness were not those of the schism, simoniacal as was Boniface IX., but those semi-heathen participants in the full light of the Italian Renascence of the closing quarter of the fifteenth century. The papacy, through the long struggles of the Councils of that century, was

Decline of the Papacy.

a hindrance rather than a help to reform. By the year 1500, it was evident that churchly renovation through its initiation was out of the question.

The decHne of the papacy, moreover, involved in large measure the spiritual decay of the clerical body of which it was the head. That decline was, it is equally true, made possible in its extreme degree by the widely prevalent decay of discipline and the low spiritual state of the clerical orders as a whole. The papacy was no worse than the higher clergy generally ; and the same causes produced the same worldly traits in both. But, admitting its exaggeration, there is still much truth in the complaint of Nicholas of Clemanges, uttered at the beginning of the fifteenth century, that the corruption of the higher clerical offices had led to the filling of the lower with ignorant and unworthy men, and to the degradation of the monastic orders, till the spiritual condition of the Church had become such as apparently to threaten its very continuance as an organization. Piety among the population of Christendom generally had probably advanced, as has already been pointed out ; but the official leaders of Christendom had grown increasingly separate from the laity, were felt to be less adequate to the expression of religious faith, and less moved by a high and unworldly spiritual zeal than they once had been.

While the papacy had thus been deteriorating for more than two centuries previous to the Reformation, certain changes had been taking place in western Christendom which would have taxed the utlo The Reformation.

most powers of the papacy in its best days to have controlled in such fashion as to retain its mediaeval prestige and authority. Life had been expanding in many directions, and the simpler conditions of the middle ages had been passing into more complex, more developed, less easily directed social forms.

The most obvious of such changes and the most tangible in its effects on the papacy was the rise of modern national life. A large part of the success of the mediaeval popes had been due to the fact that although royal titles were worn, as in France, during the middle ages, wherever the countries of Europe were permeated by feudalism a strong central authority was lacking, a feeling of national unity was not found, and papal authority encountered nothing like a national resistance. Feudalism prevailed very unequally in different lands ; but it was a divisive force always. Germany had seemed to promise an exception to this mediaeval disorganization ; but the work of its abler emperors could not bring a permanent national unity. Its imperial ambitions turning it aside from the path of internal development, its disputes as to the occupancy of the imperial office, its internal dissensions and its considerable degree of feudalization made the empire weaker than the papacy in the struggles of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The unfolding of modern nationality came first in France. Three able kings, Louis VL (1108-37), Philip Augustus (i 179-1223), and Louis IX. (1226-70), slowly raised the royal power to a greater

France. 1 1

height than that of any vassal of the French crown and developed a sense of national unity in that rudimentary form of a perception of common interests as Frenchmen and hostility to all outside of French territory as foreigners. So strong was this comparatively new-kindled feeling that Philip IV. (1285-13 14) could buttress himself impregnably upon it in his contest with Boniface VIII., and could compel the papacy itself to leave its ancient seat under Clement V. and become in large measure the tool of the French monarchy. Much that these French sovereigns had gained seemed lost in the wars with England from 1339 to 1453, which, at times, were almost destructive to the royal power in France ; but the monarchy emerged from the long contests stronger than ever, for their cost to the feudal nobility was far greater than to the kings. So ruinous to the power of the French nobles were these wars, that, under Louis XL (1461-83), the monarchy was able to assert an authority that was in many ways absolute ; and so largely had France become a centralized state by the close of the fifteenth century, that, under Louis XL's son, Charles VIII. (1483-98), the nation dominated by the king began a career of attempted foreign conquest that was to modify the politics of Europe throughout the whole Reformation period. The same centralizing policy and the same attempt to extend the borders of France were pursued by Louis XII. (1498-15 1 5), and even more conspicuously by the brilliant and ambitious Francis I. (15 15-47)' whose reign was contemporary with the early course of the Reformation. Under his rule France enjoyed a splendid, if corrupt, court, an aggressive foreign policy and military glory, not leading, however, to permanent military success. The contrast between the France of Francis I. and that of a Philip I. (1060-1108) is that between disorganization and unity, between weakness through division and a degree of strength such as no completely feudal system could approach.

" In England a similar growth in national sentiment and in royal power is to be noted. Edward I. (1272-1307) had felt strong enough to limit the abuse of ecclesiastical holdings of land by the statute of mortmain in 1279; Edward III. (1327-77) had gone further, and, with the aid of Parliament, had restricted papal appointments to English livings and appeals to papal courts by the statutes of provisors and of praemunire in 1350 and 1353. In 1366 Parliament had refused longer to pay the special tax which John had granted to Innocent III. in 1213, as a pledge of English submission to the papacy. During the closing years of the reign of Edward III. and the beginning of that of Richard II. (1377-99), WicHf acquired not merely much popular following in his anti-papal endeavors, but considerable support from those prominent in English politics. The incoming of the house of Lancaster with Henry IV. (1399-1413) somewhat strengthened the position of the Church, whose aid the Lancastrian sovereigns sought, and the monarchy itself seemed near to shipwreck in the struggles between Yorkists and Lancastrians from

Eyigland. ^ 3

r^TTT^. But, as the long wars with England proved to the ultimate advantage of the French monarchy by the destruction they brought to the French nobility, so the wars of the Roses cost the nobles of England much more than they did he crown The monarchy emerged from them by the accession of Henry VII. (1485-1509), the f^rst of the house of Tudor, with power greater than it had ever possessed before. Parliament survived ; the king was still bound to submit to law, in theory at least, as fully as any of his subjects; but, prac tically, the highest authority in the state was the will of the sovereign. And so far had a sense of national unity grown that the sovereigns of the Tudor line, arbitrary as they were, were generally popular as embodying the national aspirations and affording a true national executive. With death of Henry VII. in 1509, the ablest of the Tudors, Henry VIII., had come to a throne which he was to occupy till i547-a series of years nriore momentous than any period of similar_ length in English history. Probably national spirit, opposition to foreign rule, and a sense of corporate unity were more highly developed in England than in any other country at the dawn of the Reformation.

Spain was the poUtical marvel of the years immediately preceding the Reformation. Aside from the routes of commerce between Europe and the Orient, barred by the Pyrenees from easy intercourse with other European lands, and ruled, from 711 onward, over most of its extent by the disciples of Mohammed, its share in the life of medueval Europe had been slight. Its own history had been that of a permanent crusade of its Christian inhabitants against the Moslems, by which the latter had gradually been driven southward, till, severely defeated in the battle of Tolosa in 12 12, they had soon after been confined to the realm of Granada, while the Christians were grouped in the four kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Navarre. These states were weak through mutual warfare, and the independence and jealousies of their feudal nobility. The royal power in each was feeble. Till past the middle of the fifteenth century nothing that could properly be called a Spanish nation had come into being, and the influence of Spain on the rest of Europe was relatively inconsiderable.

Suddenly this insignificance was at an end, and as the sixteenth century opened, Spain had risen to the position of the first power in Europe — a transformation as startling to the politicians of that day as the rise of the Scandinavian lands to political supremacy during the next generation would be to the statesmen of our time. The foundation of the modern Spanish monarchy was laid when, in 1469, the prospective rulership of the greater portion of the Spanish peninsula was united by the marriage of Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, with Isabella, heiress of Castile. Two sovereigns of greater abilities have probably never held rule together. Ferdinand, skilful, diplomatic, far-sighted and heavy-handed, was admirably supplemented by the conscientious, high-minded, religious Isabella. The authority of the crown was stren-

Spain. 1 5

uously asserted, the internal disunions of Castile and of Aragon were vigorously put down, the nobles and the Church were bent to the royal wills. In 1492, Granada was added, by the defeat of its Moorish rulers, to the Spanish realm. The attempted conquests of France enabled Ferdinand to extend his power over Naples by 1504, and speedily to spread the Spanish influence to other parts of Italy ; while the discovery of a new world not only gave the Spanish crown vast possessions beyond the Atlantic, but poured a revenue into the Spanish treasury such as no European sovereign had hitherto enjoyed. No wonder men were looking with amazement and with concern at the fresh young power of Spain as the Reformation opened, and this concern was the deeper when, on the death of Ferdinand in 15 16, these great possessions came into the hands of his grandson of sixteen, already master of the Netherlands, and soon to rule a large portion of Germany and wear the imperial title as Charles V. Italy, in this period, presents a complete contrast to the three countries which have just been considered. Nowhere was wealth so great, culture so diffused, art so developed, or commercial activity so marked as in the northern half of the peninsula. But nowhere was political union more wanting than in Italy. Some degree of consolidation had, in deed, taken place since the minutely subdivided time when Francis of Assisi, the future founder of the great mendicant order, could be held a prisoner of war at Perugia, within sight of his home, by the forces of this near-by enemy of his native city. Five states included the greater part of Italy at the close of the fifteenth century — Milan and Venice on the north ; Florence, the States of the Church, and Naples embracing its central and southern portions. These states were continually at war one with another. Their quarrels, their leagues, their treaties, were kaleidoscopic.

These long-continuing disputes produced results of importance. They compelled the papacy to become politically one of several Italian principalities, differing little from the others in methods or aims of political advancement. It was as a thoroughly secular-minded Italian prince, for instance, that Alexander VI. (1492-1503) intrigued in Italian affairs, and sought the advancement of his own family; or Julius II. (1503-13) led his troops as a commanding general against Perugia and Bologna. Italian politics, rather than religious considerations, often shaped the action of the papacy during the opening years of the Reformation, so that, for political advantage, the papacy at times aided causes the success of which made for the spread of Protestantism, as when, by supporting Francis I. of France in 1526, Clement VII. prevented the emperor Charles V. from effective interference with the Reformation.