Chapter III - The reformation movements in Germany

Summary

If the Reformation can be said to have begun with a single dramatic event, it was not the alleged posting of Luther’s ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. It was rather the stage-managed burning of the papal bull Exsurge domine, which Luther committed to the flames before the Elstertor at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520, along with the books of canon law. The entire university was invited to witness this public act of defiance of the church’s highest authorities, and after the dignitaries had gone home, students took over the ceremony by holding a parodied procession with a puppet of the pope and a mock papal bull, which they burned along with the books of Luther’s opponents. Not long afterwards the first outbreak of collective violence in support of the cause of religious reform took place in Erfurt, the other university town with which Luther had close personal connections and where he found a mass of enthusiastic supporters. Events there on 11–12 June 1521 first took the form of a rowdy student protest against a ban on Luther’s supporters among the city’s two collegiate chapters. This turned into an organised anticlerical riot, as journeymen and country-folk in town for the mid-week market joined in to sack over forty clerical houses and premises of the town’s nominal overlord, the archbishop of Mainz. The Erfurt town council possibly connived at the riot and it certainly used the occasion to force the town’s clergy to surrender many of their privileges in return for protection against further popular wrath.