Chapter VII - Politics and the institutionalisation of reform in Germany

Summary

‘I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that neither a prince or emperor inflicted such damage upon it.’ If Luther actually spoke these words recorded in his Table Talk, he betrayed either a faulty memory or a poor grasp of political realities. It is true that he often exerted little influence on the storm that swirled around him, although he stood at its epicentre, but it was certainly not true that the Word did it all. The long-term success of demands for religious reform, even in the limited form it was to take in Germany, depended in the last resort on politics, which in turn crucially influenced the institutional shape it was to take. From the very beginning, the reform of religion was so entangled with political issues of many different kinds, that it could never give rise to an unpolitical Reformation: to put it bluntly, without politics, no Reformation.

As soon as ‘Luther’s cause’ became a matter of public debate, the fate of religious reform was tied to princely politics within the Holy Roman Empire, for Luther’s very survival depended on the protection afforded him by the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. Frederick was certainly convinced of Luther’s sincerity and integrity by advisors such as his chaplain Georg Spalatin and his chancellor Gregor Brück, but his willingness to take this protection to its limits was also influenced by a streak of anti-Habsburg politics shared by many other princes of the empire.