Part 92

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. {1057} 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. {1059} 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.