HIST 102 #4 - Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire

Hello, welcome back to Western Civilization 102. Our lecture series for these topics. Today, we have a very interesting topic. Dr. Price will go more in-depth with a very pivotal, pivotal figure in Western Civilization, and his name, of course, is Martin Luther.

Now, Martin Luther, as we will discover, is extremely important because of what he creates, what he begins, I guess you could say, with the Protestant Reformation. Now, in previous lectures, Dr. Robinson has discussed that what the Catholic Church doctrines, um, Dr. Robinson mentioned how can you be saved? And that's according to the church, you have to have faith and good works. Do good works, and then you could be saved. Dr. Robinson also mentioned that there are the different sacraments that kind of stay with you throughout your whole life: communion and baptism, and even extreme unction, that's when the priest gives you the last rites. So, these different sacraments, I've mentioned only a few, but they will kind of go with us throughout our whole lives, as Dr. Robinson mentioned in one of his lectures.

So, now, if you can kind of touch back a little bit on that knowledge, we will see that not everyone, um, feels comfortable doing everything that the church is saying to do. Not everyone feels like that this will work, that they will be saved, of course. And the man of the hour, at least this hour, of course, is Martin Luther. Dr. Price will take you back and and explain how Martin Luther comes to his conclusions that will, of course, differ from the Catholic Church doctrine. It is extremely interesting that, you know, Martin Luther actually was a monk, and he kept asking himself the question, "What must I do to be saved?" "I don't feel good. I don't feel like I'm being saved. I know I have faith, and yeah, I did good works, but I just still don't feel it." And so he's tormenting himself, as we will discover in this upcoming lecture, but he's tormenting himself trying to answer that question. And eventually, he does answer it after much soul searching and reading of the Bible. Martin Luther will determine that you only need faith, justification by faith alone, that you can read the Bible yourself, that, um, he did believe in some of the sacraments. He didn't believe in all of them, okay? But he does keep a few of the church sacraments. He does still believe in communion, and he does still believe in baptism, infant, of course, not adult. That's another lecture, another story that involves a radical part of the Reformation. I know it's crazy, adult baptism, radical, but there, that's the case. But Martin Luther believed in communion like the church did, and he also believed in baptism, infant. But Martin Luther's communion is not going to, there will be differences. In fact, the issue of communion, that, as you know, you'll see throughout the upcoming lectures, even Protestants have problems with, um, the definition of communion, what it really means. We already know that with the church doctrine, it means it's called transubstantiation, the bread and the wine are being transformed into the body and the blood of Christ. Um, that changes with the Protestant Reformation.

And another interesting thing about Luther is that, you know, he, of course, was a monk, but he ends up marrying a nun. He broke up, uh, one of a group of nuns and he married them all off. And there was one left, the last one to be married off, and he took her, married her, and seemed to be very happy, as all accounts. So he married, had kids, um, and managed to live a natural life, a healthy life. There were a few times in there during his lifetime that it looked a little iffy for Martin Luther, that he could have been executed, as others were. You've heard in past lectures that a man named Huss was given safe passage by the church to attend the Council of Constance, and he was captured, arrested, and burned at the stake. So, you know, Martin Luther, when he, posted called his 95 Theses, it's his opinions on what he believed is necessary for salvation and and everything else like that. And now that we have writing and pamphlets and books, they spread his ideas, spread all over Europe. The church is not very happy with Martin Luther, not very happy at all. So, again, I find it extremely, um, fortunate for Luther that he managed to die a natural death. He can, of course, thank his ruler in Saxony, his name was Frederick the Wise, for at one point taking Luther and hiding him. He actually hid out because the church was not happy. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, was not happy with Luther as well, because Charles V had a lot of different territories in Europe, vast number of territories, and they were all different. Charles V felt that the church was the glue, the glue that would hold all of his territories together. And, uh, so he's not happy with Martin Luther and these new ideas that are coming out here. But, you know, Charles V, as you will find out in Dr. Price's lecture, he's a bit busy. He has lots of things happening, um, that he has to deal with. He has to deal with France. There were problems with France. There was a threat from the Ottoman Empire. You've heard of the Ottoman Empire, kind of centered in present-day Turkey, so he had to deal with that as well. Basically, Charles V had too much on his plate, and Luther, that was very fortunate for Luther.

Um, Luther is extremely important because it doesn't end with Luther. We will, uh, in future lectures, will discuss other Protestant reformers and how they differ and are the same at times with Luther. Discuss men like Ulrich Zwingli of Switzerland and John Calvin, originally in France, he goes to Switzerland and reorganizes the City of Geneva. Calvin, of course, is very influential to the United States, to America, because he influences a group in England known as the Puritans. The Puritans, of course, the Puritans will end up settling in Massachusetts Bay, um, and of course, North American history, very important religiously to the Protestant Reformation. There's definitely a tie. All right, well, let's find out more about Martin Luther and what he believed and and what happened in this period.

The Protestant Reformation was begun by a man named Martin Luther, and in order to understand why he began the Reformation, probably the first thing we should do is learn a little bit more about Luther himself. Now, Luther was born in 1483 in the little village of Eisleben in the, uh, principality of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire, and what today is Germany. Uh, his family came from a prosperous middle-class merchant family, uh, that his father had been fairly successful in business and provided Luther with a very good early education, and then he sent him off to the University of Erfurt in Saxony to study law. Luther was a good student. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees and then prepared to enter law school. After all, if you're a bourgeois family, it's always a good idea to have an attorney, and the family in Luther was going to be that attorney.

Well, just after he entered law school, he took a short vacation, went home to Eisleben, Eisleben, presumably with a big bag of dirty laundry over his shoulder to visit his family. After the break was over, he was returning back to Erfurt, walking back to the town where the university was, and he got caught in a dreadful thunderstorm, a terrible thunderstorm with lightning falling all around him, torrential rain and wind. Scared the heck out of him. As he was running to find shelter, a bolt of lightning hit the ground literally a few feet from him, knocked him down. In his panic, Martin Luther prayed to the to Saint Anne. Saint Anne was the patron saint of Luther's family, and he made her a promise. He said, "If I lived, if I survived the thunderstorm, I would leave the university, devote my life to Christ, take up a life, the life of a monk in a monastery." Well, he did live, and when he arrived in the city of Erfurt, rather than go back to the university to study law, Luther moved into an Augustinian monastery in the town of Erfurt and began to prepare to become a monk, much to the surprise, I should say, of his family and the absolute anger of his father.

Well, this monastery in Erfurt wasn't anything unusual. It wasn't any, any hotbed of new religious thought. It wasn't, there was no revolutionary movement going on there. Um, but as Luther was training for the life of a monk, he began to have some serious theological and philosophical, and some folks would say psychological issues. Um, now, the goal of every Christian, the goal of every Christian is to achieve salvation, to go to heaven, and Luther is no different. Luther wanted to be saved as well, and he engaged in all of those activities that the Roman Catholic Church said one should engage in in order to achieve salvation. He did good works, he practiced humility, and he generally did all the things that one should do according to the Roman Catholic Church in order to be saved. But Luther was troubled. After all, many Christian sins aren't really sins that you actually do. They're not sins based on an activity. These are what we might call internal sins that you feel inside yourself, sins of thought rather than sins of deed. What are the seven deadly sins? Gluttony, envy, sloth, anger, jealousy, greed, pride. Yeah, something like that. Well, if you look at these, these are all essentially internal sins. They're actually all feelings. Let me, let me give you an example. Let's take my favorite, personal favorite deadly sin, for instance, gluttony. Let's say I walk by a pastry shop, and I look in the window, and in that window, I see the donuts and the brownies and the cookies and the eclairs and all the other sweet, tasty morsels that are displayed before my very eyes. I imagine what it would be like to eat, say, a dozen or two of all of them. My mouth waters, my heart rate increases, my imagination prepares me for the sugar rush. Wonderful. Well, I've just committed the sin of gluttony, um, without so much as even eating a single bite of any of those yummy, tasty pastries. The worst Christian sins, like pride and envy and lust and anger, aren't breaking the Ten Commandments. They're having these feelings that all of us seem from time to time to have. And Luther began to really obsess about his inability to get rid of these feelings, pride, anger, envy. No matter how often he tried, no matter how often he went to mass, no matter how often he went to confession, he still seemed to have these terrible sinful feelings. His fellow monks tried very hard to persuade him that this was simply a part of being human, that he had nothing to worry about, that, that, that he should sort of get over it and move on. Uh, but Luther couldn't help himself. He obsessed increasingly about these sinful feelings, and, uh, he was became increasingly convinced that he was going to go to hell, that he would not achieve salvation.

Well, what do you do with a fellow monk who seems, yeah, just a tad off his rocker, uh, and is sure as hell driving you crazy? Uh, the answer for the Abbot at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt was, you make him a college professor. It just so happened that Frederick the Wise, the ruler of Saxony, the principality where, uh, where, where Luther lived, had started a new university in his lands, in his realm, in the city of Wittenberg. Now, uh, so as well, the head of the monastery decided that he would send Luther to Wittenberg to work at this university, to teach theology at the University of Wittenberg. Uh, and, uh, maybe he hoped that if Luther got into the world a little bit, sort of moved on beyond the walls of the monastery, got busy, maybe he would stop worrying himself quite so much about these, these obsessions that he had about sin and damnation.

Well, Luther went to Wittenberg, he began teaching theology there, and while he was preparing for his theology course, he ran across in 1515, he ran across a revelation, for him at any rate, that he found in Saint Paul's letter to the Romans in the New Testament. They ran across verse 1:17, which reads, "For in it, the Gospels, the righteousness of God is revealed through faith, for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith." Well, this was a, this was a revolution in thought for Luther. Luther concluded from this passage that faith alone saves human beings. Faith alone. Humans are saved by faith alone. Human beings can't do anything themselves. Luther decided to achieve salvation, salvation is a free gift from God, and no people deserve it because all humans are sinful by nature. No one deserves salvation. So salvation is a free gift from God, and the best we can do is have faith, faith alone, that God will save us. All the good works in the world, saying prayers, performing mass, attending mass, going to confession, going on pilgrimages, uh, uh, saying the rosary, all the things that the Roman Catholic Church said were good works that would get you into heaven, Luther says, all the works in the world will not save you and will not bring you a jot closer to salvation. Only God, said Luther, can grant salvation, which is essentially an undeserved gift. None of us deserves salvation.

Well, it's funny, ironic, I guess, that at first, Luther really doesn't run into any problems with the church as he begins to teach these ideas and publishes these, uh, publishes these ideas, because this idea isn't terribly revolutionary. It's not terribly unusual within Roman Catholic thought, within Christian history and Christian theology. Even Saint Augustine, the great Christian thinker in the 400s, had reached a similar conclusion.

So, Luther doesn't really run up against the Catholic establishment over his theological teaching. What causes a rift between Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church was something called the Indulgence Controversy. The Indulgence Controversy, which occurs in 1517 in Germany, and this is going to take some explaining, so we're in for a bumpy ride for a few minutes, um, as I'm sure somebody else has said in this class so far. From the 1200s, the church always seemed to need more and more and more money, more and more wealth. The Pope had lots of building projects, administrative costs, even political and military efforts, and all of these required a tremendous amount of money. Well, one way to pick up some money was an idea that had emerged in the late Middle Ages, and it was something called the sale of indulgences.

Well, indulgences are meant to substitute for the penance for sin. If you're a Roman Catholic and you commit a sin, you're supposed to go to confession. When you confess your sin, the, the priest will give you a, a penance, something that you have to do to sort of make up for that sin, a work, if you will, and then he says, "Used to in the old days, say, 'Te absolvo,' I absolve you of that sin." Now, that's first off, it's not the priest that absolves you, it's God. And secondly, uh, it is a conditional absolution. Your absolved conditional on performing the penance. Hope you're with me so far. Um, an indulgence during the Crusades, popes gave out indulgences to men who went to fight in the Holy Land. Men who went to fight the, the Muslims in the Holy Land were given indulgences, uh, as a essentially a way to get around the, the penances that they would have to perform otherwise for their sins. It was an inducement, if you will. Um, I should point out, and you should write down, that the indulgence did not guarantee salvation. Did not guarantee salvation, nor did it absolve the holder of the sin. All it did was replace the penance, the, the act that would have to be performed in order to receive absolution. But unfortunately, I should say, probably fortunately for the Catholic Church, at first, to most uneducated Europeans, an indulgence looked as if they were simply buying forgiveness when they brought an indulgence. In other words, it was to them, an indulgence became a sort of a get out of hell free card. As the church made more and more money from the sale of indulgences, church leaders realized how lucrative this process was, and they did less and less to try to explain to people that this was not a get out of hell free card, that this was actually simply a replacement for penance. After all, they were making way too much money at the sale of indulgences.

So, to make matters even worse, the idea grew up, and the church began to proclaim that Jesus and the Saints had performed, if you will, a surplus of good acts, way more than they needed to get into heaven, and that these good acts, these good deeds, surplus of merit was stored in a place in Rome called the Treasury of Merit. And when you bought an indulgence, you essentially bought a check that contained some of the merit, some of the good deeds of Jesus Christ and the Saints, and, and that would be what you would purchase, and you could use it to get out of hell for yourself or to speed a recently dead relative to the pearly gates. They make dandy gifts for any occasion, and most folks had come to believe that they would immediately push a loved one right into heaven. So, that's what an indulgence is.

Now, in 1517, the great German lord, Albert of Hohenzollern, decided that he wanted to purchase two more archbishoprics, two more dioceses, two more titles of Archbishop from the Pope. Now, Albert of Hohenzollern already had a number, held a number of church offices, and he wanted two more. The Pope at the time was Leo the Tenth, and he was certainly happy to sell them for a sum of 34,000 ducats, which was probably, in, in modern U.S. dollars, somewhere in the neighborhood of a million bucks, $1.4 million. Now, the problem was that Albert didn't have the money. So, he and Pope Leo decided on an arrangement, and this arrangement worked like this: the church would hold an indulgence sale in the various dioceses of Northern Germany that Albert dominated, an indulgence sale. The Pope would get half the profit off the top, Albert would get half the profit, and then Albert could use the money from the sale to pay off the Pope. This is pretty darn sordid, um, but that's essentially the arrangement that Albert and the Pope came to.

The man who was put in charge of the sale was a Dominican monk by the name of John Tetzel. Now, he was a particularly enthusiastic salesman. I have no doubt that if he were alive today, uh, he would be a very successful used car salesman. He presented indulgences as a simple monetary transaction. "Give me money, I'll give you an indulgence. Your sins will be forgiven, and you will go straight to heaven." Or, "If you buy an indulgence for a loved one, they will go straight to heaven." He even had a sales pitch. I couldn't make this up. It goes like this: "As soon as money in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." In other words, the minute you drop your money in and purchase your indulgence, your loved one who's in purgatory goes straight to heaven, zip, seamlessly.

Well, Luther was really outraged by this indulgence sale, and he decided to make an issue of it. On, as a sales caravan approached Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther nailed a long list of 57 arguments against the sale of indulgences, um, I'm sorry, 95 arguments against the sale of indulgences, 95 arguments against the sale of indulgences, and these are called the 95 Theses, propositions written in Latin that Luther offered to debate against the sale of indulgences. And a number of these arguments reflected Luther's earlier idea that you can't get into heaven on works, you can't get into heaven on deeds, you can't get into heaven on merit, that only faith, and faith alone, will help you attain salvation. In other words, what he was saying is, indulgences are a big old scam. In fact, he even suggested that the church itself might not be necessary for salvation, only faith. And this was some, these were some really dangerous ideas to have in 1517.

Now, October 31st, I'm sure you know, is Halloween, and November 1st, the next day, is All Saints' Day. It is, in the Catholic Church, a holy day of obligation. You are supposed to go, every good Catholic is supposed to go to church on that day. Uh, and so the next morning, by the way, these were tacked up on the door to the Cathedral at Wittenberg, and the next morning, hundreds and hundreds of people walk by those, those Theses, and read that piece of paper. And if they couldn't read Latin, they had somebody read it for them. And within a matter of weeks, publishers had begun to publish these, uh, these arguments, had begun to publish the 95 Theses, and that brought instant attention to Martin Luther, as thousands of people all over Europe began to read his arguments. And the church immediately decided at this point that this Luther guy might be causing some trouble.

Well, in 1518, the next year, the church sent a cardinal by the name of Cajetan to visit Luther, to discourse, debate with him, and to force him to recant his, his beliefs. Cajetan and Luther debated on the issues for three days, and Luther went away thinking maybe he didn't have a future in the Roman Catholic Church. And I suspect Cajetan went away suspecting that Luther didn't have much of a future in the church either. In 1519, the Roman Catholic Church sent a renowned, well-known theologian and scholar by the name of Johann Eck to debate with Luther, and they debated for a couple, three days. And Eck's debates, Eck's ideas really were kind of superior to Luther's. And so what Luther decided to do as a result of that was he decided to, to fine-tune and refine his ideas. Luther became absolutely convinced by 1519 of the need, the necessity to break with the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, in 1520, Luther came to the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, a fellow by the name of Charles V Habsburg. Charles V Habsburg, and, uh, he, he, I should tell you, Charles V is probably the, the, in terms of territory, the greatest ruler in Europe in the 1500s. Charles V, as we're going to see, was also the ruler of Austria, of the Netherlands and Belgium, of Northeastern France and Spain, and of course, as the ruler of Spain, he had just acquired a vast number of territories in the New World, and all this, I should say, at the age of 20.

Well, when the Protestant Reformation erupted in, in his lands in Germany, Charles was keenly interested and very worried. He realized there were going to be political consequences of this Reformation. He also considered himself to be the guardian of his subjects, and as a Roman Catholic, he believed that only Roman Catholicism offered salvation. Only Roman Catholicism offered salvation, and so he was intensely worried about this, this new religious movement. In 1521, Charles invited Luther to come before him and present his views, to be questioned not only by Charles but by a number of other theologians and clergymen. Charles guaranteed Luther that nothing would happen to him if he went to these debates, and after the debates were over, Charles worried that Luther needed to be dealt with, that Luther presented an enormous threat not only to his kingdom but to Roman Catholicism. So he wanted to arrest Luther and make him disappear. But by this stage in the game, Luther had some very powerful friends, especially Frederick the Wise, and these powerful friends spirited Luther away to, uh, a castle out in the, in the wilds of Saxony called Wartburg Castle. And Luther would actually stay in this castle, which is out in the middle of nowhere, uh, for, for nearly two years in order to avoid being arrested, being nabbed by Charles V and his henchmen. During this time at Wartburg, Luther translated the New Testament into German. He created the first vernacular version, that is, a local language version of the New Testament, and this Bible would essentially become the first Protestant Bible.

Now, in 1520, Luther published three pamphlets that really set up the basic ideas of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and we can say that by 1520, there is no longer one unified church in Western Civilization. There are now two: Catholicism and Protestantism.

Okay, what I want to do now is go through the basic Lutheran principles so you can understand them, and so maybe you can see a little bit of the difference between Luther and Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Um, Luther asked, I should say, no new questions about Christianity, and he really came up with no new answers either. Luther was not a consistent thinker, that is, once he, he started to deal with an idea, uh, he, he, he didn't deal with it terribly consistently. He would become emotional, he had some pre-founded prejudices, and all this stuff would enter into his discourse, enter into his arguments, and affect the sort of logical outcome of his ideas. Uh, he stressed answers that the Roman Catholic Church could not accept, and that was the basic danger for Martin Luther, more than anything else. That's what represented the break between himself and the church.

So, let's start with the theological questions. The most important question for Christians, we've already mentioned, is the question: How is a person saved? How can I achieve salvation? Now, at this time, the Roman Catholic Church stressed that salvation came from good works. Uh, a person strove to do as many good works as possible. It involved a tremendous variety of things like attending mass and participating in the sacraments and reciting prayers and making pilgrimages and performing penance and stuff like that. And Luther rejected this idea completely. Luther said that good works, to believe that good works will get you into heaven, is like trying to bargain with God. To believe that good works will get you into heaven is trying to bargain with God, and you're always going to lose that bargain. You can never really strike a deal with the Almighty. So, for Luther, the best we can do is have faith that God will save us, faith and faith alone.

Well, how do you, how do you get this faith? Do you earn it? No, you can't even seek it. It's a free gift from God out of his infinite mercy. When you have faith, you're not a better person. You're still a sinner. The only difference is that now you can trust that God will save you. Well, if all this is true, how do you know you have faith? Luther kind of worked with this one for a while, but what he ultimately declared is that if you worry about whether or not you have been saved, if you, take it up as a, as a, as a difficult question, then you've probably been saved. In other words, if you become almost as compulsive as Luther had been about sin, then you've probably been saved.

Well, that's the first question: How can I be saved? The second question is: What is the nature of religious authority? What is the nature of religious authority? In other words, if you have religious or theological questions, who do you go to to get answers? Now, the Roman Catholic Church is easy for this one. If you have a question, you go to your priest, and if your priest has a question, he goes to his bishop, and if the bishop has a question, he goes to the Archbishop, and then to the Pope, and so on. The, the religious authority in the Roman Catholic Church is based on the hierarchy of the clergy, from the parish priest all the way up to the Pope. Luther says that this is simply not true. Luther argues that religious authority rests in the word of God. In other words, if you want answers, you go to the Bible. You go to the scripture, and there can be found all the answers.

Well, that sounds pretty easy, but if you've ever read the Bible, then you probably know that it's not that easy to understand. It requires a certain degree of study and interpretation, and, uh, what, what that means is that different people will go to the Bible and come up with different answers, different interpretations. So, Luther isn't really saying each of us should go to the Bible and figure it out for ourselves, although that is the idea that'll emerge from Protestantism. Luther actually said that people can agree or disagree over the text of the Bible, but in order to understand the Bible, you have to have faith. You already have to be saved in order for the Bible to essentially open up and talk to you. You have to, you have to to have faith, and in fact, it's simply more evidence that you've been saved. Uh, or how do you know if the Bible opens up to you? How do you know when it speaks to you? Luther basically said, if it tells you what it told me, then you're in good shape. If it tells you something different from what it told me, then you obviously don't have sufficient faith.

Okay, the third question is: What, what is the church? And again, it's easy for Catholics. The church is the visible institution of the Roman Catholic Church. In other words, the church includes all the clergy, priests and bishops and monks and nuns, archbishops, the Pope, and, and, and, and that's what for the Roman Catholic Church, the church is the visible institutions of the Roman Catholic Church. And again, Luther says, no, that's not the church. The church, says Luther, is the community of believers. In other words, the church isn't the, the clergy. The church is essentially the congregation, the practitioners. Uh, Luther stressed that every Christian is a priest. He called it the priesthood of all believers, and that no person is closer to God than any other person.

Well, this is a great idea. The church is the congregation, the church is all of the communicants, the church is all Christians. But if that's the case, somebody's got to take responsibility for the church. Somebody has to make sure that the sermons are written, somebody has to make sure that their orphanages and and charitable organizations in the parish, somebody's got to make sure of the various things that churches need in order to do the stuff that they have to do. And Luther said the ultimate responsibility for all of these tasks that the church has to perform, the ultimate responsibility for all of these tasks lies with the state. And in the case of Germany, the prince, the ruler of a principality. Um, Luther said that the ultimate responsibility for all these tasks is the state, the government. So there would be no difference really between church and state in a Lutheran state. Um, and in those days of course, that meant kings and princes, and that turned out to be a big advantage for Martin Luther, because German Lutheran princes would become the leaders and protectors of the new Protestant churches.

Now, as I said a little while ago, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was really not very happy about the Reformation, and especially not very happy about the Reformation taking place in Germany, one of his realms. Um, it was a, essentially a new religious movement had sprouted right in his front yard, and this worried him a great deal. So, you might have wondered, and of course, Charles V was an extremely powerful ruler, so you might have wondered why he didn't do something about it, why he didn't stamp out Protestantism just as it was beginning to take hold. The answer to that question, in order to answer that question, I've got to tell you a little bit about the Holy Roman Empire and how it worked, and also I have to tell you about some of the problems that Charles V had during his time as Emperor.

Well, okay, Charles was the Holy Roman Emperor, but the Holy Roman Empire wasn't really an empire at all. It was divided up into a whole bunch of little states, each one of them had a government peculiar to itself. They were little semi-sovereign states, we might say. Each one of them was ruled by a prince. They might have different names, they might be called Dukes or princes or counts. Frederick the Wise was called the Elector of Saxony, but they are, they're usually referred to simply as the German princes, and they are just as powerful, in fact, more powerful in their little state, their little principality, than the Holy Roman Emperor. A few cities, in fact, were even ruled by town councils, and, and there were even a bunch of really tiny states that were ruled by knights. And again, within their state, within their little principality, they are more powerful than the Holy Roman Emperor. Theoretically, all of these little states are part of the empire, and they would meet in a government called the Holy Roman Empire, but the catch is that the emperor really didn't exercise a whole lot of power over these little states. It's easy to compare the Holy Roman Empire of those days with say, the United Nations today. Just like the United Nations, the Holy Roman Empire could pass laws, but the little states within the empire simply, if they didn't agree with the laws, they could simply ignore them.

Well, when the Protestant Reformation began, some of these states became Lutheran, and some of them remained Catholic. Um, now Charles, and it all depended on, on the will of the prince. If the prince decided to be Lutheran, then his state would become Lutheran as well. Now, Charles really wanted to exert his power to force these Lutheran princes to return to the Catholic Church, but the problem was that Charles always had bigger fish to fry. There were two basic international threats that would keep Charles busy pretty much throughout his reign. The first one in the West was France, and the second one, another threat posed in the East, was the Ottoman Empire, the Turks.

So, first, let's talk a little bit about France to understand why the French, or why the King of France was an enemy of Charles V, all you have to do is look at a map. Now, uh, the king at the time was a fellow by the name of Francis the First. He was young, he was ambitious, and by and large, he was a pretty good French king. But if you look at the map, what you see is that France is essentially the meat in a Charles V sandwich. Charles V is the, the king of the ruler of the Low Countries, what today would be Belgium and the Netherlands. He also is the Holy Roman Emperor, what today is Germany and parts of Northern Italy. He is also the king of Spain and Portugal, which means that France is stuck right in the middle. That almost all of the surrounding countries on the European continent are ruled by Charles V. Um, from time to time, well, throughout Charles's reign, from time to time, France and, um, Charles would go to war in what are called the Habsburg-Valois Wars, and Charles would have to respond to Francis over and over and over again in order to defend his lands.

Now, the second threat came from the East, and the danger here is the Ottoman Empire, which is centered in Turkey. In 1500, the Ottoman Empire was the greatest threat that Europe had. The Turks are Muslim and Asian, for the most part, and the Ottoman Empire had begun in modern-day Turkey, but by 1500, it had spread out all the way across North Africa, and it was putting pressure in the West on Spain and East on Austria, and of course, Charles V ruled both of those countries. So, no matter where the Turks pressed, Charles V would get hit first. Um, in 1526, the Turks would conquer part of Hungary and even extend to as close as 60 miles from the city of Vienna, the Habsburg capital of Austria. Now, the ruler of the Turks was a fellow by the name of Suleiman the Magnificent. Suleiman's father had conquered a very large area of, of Africa and Asia, and poor Suleiman, in order to be magnificent, felt like he needed to live up to Daddy, which meant that he wanted to conquer ever larger amounts of territory, and quite frankly, all he had left was Europe.

These wars against France and Turkey essentially prevented Charles from restoring Catholicism in Germany. Each and every time Charles would get himself into a position where he thought he could force the Lutheran princes back to the Roman Catholic fold, a war would break out either with France or with Turkey, and Charles would need these Protestant princes to support him in his war efforts. And of course, in order to do that, he had to make deals with them, and, and in making deals, he weakened his hand, he weakened his ability to control the spread of Lutheranism, the spread of this new Protestant movement in Germany, and, and elsewhere.

In 1555, Charles V finally gave up. He sat down with Catholic and Lutheran princes in the town of Augsburg in Germany, and he composed the Religious Peace of Augsburg. This treaty contained basically two provisions. First, it recognized the Lutheran religion, but not Calvinism. We'll talk about Calvinism a little later. It recognized the Lutheran religion as a legal religion in Germany. Henceforth, if you wanted to be a Lutheran and you were a prince, you could be a Lutheran. It also declared that each German prince could decide what religion he wanted to be his state religion. Uh, if, if you're Lutheran, then your state will be Lutheran. If you're Catholic, then your state, and of course, all the people in it, will be Catholics. Uh, the principle of this idea that the religion of the state is the religion of the prince is known as *cuius regio, eius religio*. *Cuius regio, eius religio*, essentially what it means is, "The religion of the prince is the religion of his people."

Well, who are the winners and who are the losers? The real winners in the religious struggle in Germany between 1520 and 1555 are the princes, and especially the Protestant princes. They get all that church property, they get to collect the tithes in their territory, they can completely control the faith of their subjects, and all this adds up to power and influence. But even to some extent, the Catholic princes acquire a certain amount more power over the Emperor because now he needs these Catholic princes even more so. So, the winners, the big winners in the early Protestant Reformation are the princes, and the big loser in this particular argument is Charles V. In fact, in 1556, he simply quits. He gives up all of his crowns, all of his titles, he steps down as Holy Roman Emperor, he retires as the King of Spain, and all these other, gives up all these other titles as well, and he moves to a monastery in Spain and spends the rest of his life in prayer and meditation. He is, in a 900-year history, the only Holy Roman Emperor who ever resigned or retired from the office. And in the meantime, Protestantism grew and spread and developed and changed, as we will be seeing in the next few lectures.

Well, uh, seems to me that that Religious Peace of Augsburg definitely was a win for the Protestant Reformation, since it recognized Luther's religion, or Lutheranism, as you could call it. We've just discovered that from Dr. Price's lecture, it's now a legal religion. Now, that's Lutheranism, and as pointed out, not Calvinism. There were differences between the two. Not all Protestant reformers are the same. And also, it stated that each German prince or state could decide what religion it wanted. Definite win, even for the princes, for them to be able to choose whether they will go with the church or with Lutheranism. That was extremely important. Okay, well, our next lecture discusses another Protestant reformer by the name of Zwingli. Until next time.