*In the late Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the most powerful force in Western Europe.  The church had the power to excommunicate members, which was a powerful force of against commoners (who feared damnation if they died without confession and last rites) and princes (as Catholics were not required to obey an excommunicated ruler).  During the High Middle Ages, Pope Innocent III said that the pope was below God but above man, judging all and judged by none.  A later statement proclaimed that there was no salvation or forgiveness of sins outside the Catholic Church, and that the Pope was the head of the Church and that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff."

*Even within the Catholic Church, there were those who disagreed with absolute Papal authority.  Many popes were corrupt, taking money for religious favours (simony), keeping mistresses and illegitimate children, and getting deeply involved in local politics.

*Some church leaders felt the need to take some power into their own hands by calling a council of church leaders.  This was part of a movement called Conciliarism, which asserted the supremacy of the church leadership as a whole, not the pope alone.  

*When the Council of Pisa was called in 1409, there were already two men claiming to be Pope, and the Council declared both of them to be unfit for office, and elected a new Pope, Alexander V (soon followed by John XXIII, an Anti-Pope accused of such wicked deeds that no pope again took the name John for over 500 years).  Unfortunately, neither of the other popes stepped down as ordered, and for 7 more years, there were three men claiming to be pope.

*In 1414, another council met in Constance, Germany.  It was convened by John XXIII and later approved by Gregory XII of Rome.  Both agreed to step down as Pope, and in 1417 the Council of Constance elected a Pope Martin V.  Benedict XIII of Avignon refused to step down, but hardly anyone recognised his authority, and after his death in 1423 there was only one Pope again.

*Another Council, in Basel, Switzerland (1431-1449) tried to unify the Catholic and Orthodox churches, but failed.  Eventually, Popes grew more powerful and opposed Conciliarism, so that all future councils were strongly led by popes, until, in 1870, the doctrine of Papal Infallibility asserted the pope's authority to rule absolutely and infallibly on theological issues.

*There were individuals who disagreed with the Church as well in the late Middle Ages.  In England, John Wycliffe criticised the corruption of the Popes, the wealth of the church and its unconcern for the poor, and the church's control over Biblical instruction.  He and his supporters translated the Bible into English, publishing it in the year of his death of old age in 1384 (and updating it until 1395).  This is seen as an early act of English nationalism, and helped begin to solidify the English language.  Because he attacked the wealth and power of the Church (and of royalty) he was considered dangerous, but never excommunicated.  However, in 1415, Pope Martin V and the Council of Constance, ordered his bones dug up, burnt, and thrown in a river.  This was partly because his ideas had helped inspire further dissent in Bohemia.

*Jan Huss was introduced to the ideas of Wycliffe when the English King Richard II married Anne of Bohemia and visited her homeland.  He began to call for the reform of the Church as well and for common people to be more involved in church life.  He called on the Bohemian nobility to drive out immoral priests.  He also promoted Bohemian nationalism and reformed Czech spelling. However, by the 1400s, the Church was becoming more united and powerful, and excommunicated Huss and placed all Prague under interdict (sort of like excommunication for a whole area), but as the Hussites doubted papal authority, this had no effect, and Huss continued to criticise the sale of indulgences and Antipope John XXIII's war against Pope Gregory VII.  Ultimately the Council of Constance had him arrested, ordered him to explain himself, and finally burnt him as a heretic in 1415.  His dying prophesy was supposedly that, "in a hundred years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed."

*The first major critic of the Church to survive his efforts at reform was Martin Luther, a German monk.

*Luther was born into a family of the rising middle class and lived a typical, somewhat pampered and moderately wild life.  His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but during a walk in the woods during a thunderstorm, he became fearful for his life after lighting split a tree ten feet from him, and he prayed to St. Anne, mother of St. Mary, to save him.  He promised that if she did, he would become a monk.

*Luther joined a very strict Augustinian monastery where he was seen as a rising star, and trained to be a professor.  He was very observant, deeply concerned about personal sin and felt crushed by it.  He lived an extremely austere and self-denying life (even for a monk), praying often, sleeping and eating little, confessing frequently, and agonising over every possible sin (including worrying about whether he worried enough).  His abbot tried to get him to relent, but Luther asked to be given the worst jobs in the monastery in order to learn greater humility.  His abbot again told him to relax, saying that God was not angry at him (although it seemed that he was angry at God).

*Eventually the abbot sent Luther and anther monk to Rome on business.  Luther was ecstatic, but at he travelled to Rome, he found that the monks they stayed with elsewhere often lived loose lives.  In Rome itself, Catholicism was a business, with people selling trinkets and relics and forgiveness from sins, so much that it seemed that people worshipped the relics and rituals rather than God.  The priests and papal officials seemed cynical, corrupt, and uninterested in God.

*After returning to Germany, he was made a professor in Wittenberg, where the local ruler, Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, wanted to make the local university famous.  He therefore supported Luther during all his troubles, even though he has a large collection of relics and made a fortune allowing pilgrims to view them.

*While in Wittenberg, Luther studied the Bible, particularly the Epistle to the Romans, and concluded that man is saved by faith alone, not through good deeds, rituals, traditions, or veneration of relics or sacred places.  This was a breakthrough for this man who had always criticised himself and seen himself as unworthy of God's love.  He now saw that salvation was a gift of God, through His love for an undeserving people.  To trust in anything other than Faith, Luther now said, was to be damned.

*Luther developed these ideas just as Johann Tetzel was travelling through Germany selling indulgences to fund the renovation of St Peter's Basilica in Rome (and for income from a local Archbishop, too) with the slogan “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”   Luther saw this as unacceptable, particularly as the Pope was among the richest men in Christendom, while the purchasers of indulgences were often among the poorest.

*On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 Theses (statements or arguments) to the church door in Wittenberg.  In these he condemned the sale of indulgences, and questioned the authority of the pope and other church practises, many of which (such as the failure to print the Bible in common tongues) kept men from a personal relationship with God.  

*Luther only meant to reform the Church, so the movement he began is called the Reformation.  He did not want to break with the Church, but the Church said that men needed the Church to guide them through life, forgive their sins, and help them to do the good works necessary for salvation.  

*At first, Luther enjoyed quite a bit of support, including from his friend Erasmus and his former abbot.  Eventually, though, they felt they could not support him as the Church turned against him.

*In 1520, Luther was told to recant or be excommunicated, and in 1521 he was.

*Later that year, Luther was ordered by Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, to report to the Diet of Worms, to which he was promised safe passage by the Elector of Saxony.  At the Diet he refused to recant and was declared an outlaw.  However, after he left, he was hidden by Frederick III for 11 months in Wartburg Castle.  While there, he translated the New Testament from Greek to German, and would eventually teach that the Bible was the ultimate authority.

*Luther survived and his ideas thrived, thanks to Frederick's insistence on the sovereignty of Saxony and to the printing press, which allowed the ideas of the Reformation to spread quickly and widely.

*The ideas of the Reformation seemed to allow the common man to make decisions for himself and to attack traditional authority.  In 1524 and 1525, many peasants, inspired Reformation ideas revolted across Germany, France, and Switzerland.  Over 100,000 people were killed during the Peasants' Revolt, until a combination of military force and persuasion from Luther brought it to an end (although some of Luther's former followers had encouraged it).

*In 1525, Luther married a former nun named Katharina von Bora, bring an end to the traditional clerical celibacy among those who protested against the Catholic Church (or Protestants).  Luther did retain a few important Catholic doctrines, however:  infant baptism and the presence of Jesus in the Lord's Supper.  The Lutheran church also continues to have bishops and an episcopal hierarchy.
*By the 1500s, there were other reformers who could not be silenced, either.  Among these was Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, Switzerland.

*Like Luther, Zwingli was a priest of some importance.  However, he had seen the corruption of other priests, particularly the poor education of many of them (despite which they had to instruct others in the word of God) and the practise of keeping concubines (since they could not officially marry).  Influenced both by Erasmus and Luther (and perhaps inspired to do good after surviving an outbreak of the plague in 1519) he began to preach directly from the Bible, offering his interpretations and attempting to improve public and church morality.  He also began to question the value of many traditions until, during Lent of 1522, he and about a dozen others, publicly cut up and ate two smoked sausages.  In 1524 he married a local widow (with whom he eventually had 4 children).  Others of his followers began to attack the idea of having images and sculptures in churches, and even the concept of the Mass as a recreation of Christ's sacrifice (Zwingli said it was a commemoration).  Outbreaks of iconoclasm occurred, and some people even began to reject infant baptism in favour of adult baptism.  This was too much for Zwingli, and he came to oppose the Anabaptists, and they opposed him as he accepted the fact that the church needed to demand some offerings and that, no matter what the Bible said, charging interests on loans was good for business.  However, he was caught in the middle, as Luther would not compromise with him on the issue of the Eucharist.  Zwingli died in 1531 during the religious wars that arose from the Reformation.  His ideas remain, however, in the churches of the Reform Tradition, including Presbyterianism.

*An even more influential founder of Presbyterianism was a French Huguenot name John Calvin.  Exiled from France for his Protestant ideas, he went to Geneva, Switzerland (already influenced by Zwingli) in 1536, where his ideas of public moral and religious reform were very successful.  His popularity eventually have him a great deal of control over the city government and used it to enforce a strict moral code:  Geneva was a Calvinist theocracy.  He preached against the soul-killing nature of Catholic piety and preached for a personal relationship with God based on faith, but he also began to preach the doctrine of predestination.  According to Calvin, God (who knows all), already knows who will go to heaven and who won't.  In some ways, this gave Calvinists a sense of self-assurance and self-righteousness, but in other ways, it inculcated a constant sense of self-doubt, as Calvinists felt a need to constantly do good works and achieve worldly success in order to demonstrate that they had God's favour.

*Other Calvinists went to Scotland, where John Knox would help establish the Presbyterian Church as the Church of Scotland.  Yet others fled to England and America.

*These conflicting beliefs led to numerous wars of religion.  Zwingli died as Reform Swiss fought Catholics.  Anabaptists were leaders of the Peasants' Revolt and tried to make Münster a New Jerusalem.  Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists fought in Germany until Charles V abdicated (and split his empire) and his brother, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, signed the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, allowing each local ruler in the Empire to decide if their lands would be Catholic or Lutheran (but not anything else).  

*In France, the French Wars of Religion were fought between rural Catholic peasants and nobility (supported by King Philip of Spain) and urban Huguenot (supported by Queen Elizabeth of England).  Among the worst events of the wars was the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when Catholics slaughtered thousands of Huguenot who had gathered in Paris to see the Huguenot Prince Henry of Navarre marry the Catholic King Charles IX's sister on 18 August, 1572.  Eventually Henry became king after converting to Catholicism (Paris is worth a Mass) and in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting religious freedom to Protestants.  In 1610, Henry the Good was assassinated by Catholics.

*For all that it resisted the Protestants, the Catholic Church recognised that it had flaws, and undertook the Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation.

*Between 1545 and 1563, the Council of Trent met periodically to reform the Catholic Church.  It reaffirmed the Church's stand on the sacraments, the necessity of ordained Church leaders to lead Christendom, that salvation comes through both faith and good works, and that the Pope was the head of the Church.

*However, the Church also undertook to meet other challenges of Protestantism.  Many of the worst abuses of power and position were eliminated through very strict penalties.  Casual sale of indulgences, plurality of offices, other forms of immorality, and duelling were discouraged.  However, indulgences were not outright disclaimed, nor were the veneration of saints and relics.

*The Church edited and affirmed the Vulgate (a Latin translation of the Bible) as the official version from 1592 until 1979.

*The Index of Forbidden Books prohibited the publication of books not given the Imprimatur ("let it be printed") of the Catholic Church.

*Besides the undertaking the reforms of the Council of Trent, the Church revived the Inquisition to crush Protestantism in Spain and Italy (and to a lesser extent elsewhere).  The Church also promoted the Spanish-based Society of Jesus, or Jesuits.

*Founded by St. Ignatius Loyola of Spain, the Jesuits saw the need for reform, and stressed education, meditation, piety, and obedience.  They founded schools and colleges that mixed Renaissance humanism with Catholic scholasticism.  They trained their members to be able to dispute with the most wise and knowledgeable Protestants and Catholics alike.  They also had a strong missionary programme, spreading Catholicism around the globe—St. Francis Xavier, S.J., is known as the Apostle to the Far East.  The country of Paraguay in South America was founded and run by the Jesuits.  Some Protestants (and even Catholics) have also accused the Jesuits of being conspirators and of using their debating skills to prove that black is white—such that “Jesuitical” sometimes means manipulative or equivocating.

*Finally, the Catholic Reformation changed artistic traditions.  The Council of Trent had vaguely criticised certain trends in art and made some vague guidelines for what was acceptable and what was not.  From that point, the Inquisition began to put pressure on many contemporary artists, whom, they said, had too many nudes, too many pagan gods, goddesses, and other mythological characters, and generally did not glorify God properly.  This led to the decline of Renaissance art.  

*It was replaced by Baroque art and architecture and music, which, while ornate and intricate, also tended to depict simplistic concepts, dramatic and dynamic presentation, and obvious meanings.  It was meant to be beautiful, but also to be open and appealing to all, not dependent on deeply intellectual study or a vast knowledge of classical mythology to appreciate (although classical sources were by no means forgotten, or even ignored—many classical themes remained popular).  In other ways it could be complex—for the first time sculpture was designed to have multiple ideal viewing angles—opera had singing, acting, and beautiful costumes and scenery—architecture deliberately mixed painting, sculpture, and structural elements.  Baroque art was meant to show the beauty of the Church, to win hearts through beauty, but also to awe them with stunning majesty.

    Bernini's The Ecstacy of Saint Teresa

    Reubens's Assumption of the Virgin

    Rembrandt, Captain Frans Banning Cocq Mustering His Company, also known as The Night Watch

    The Church of San Benedetto

    Castle of Trier

*The Renaissance changed how men viewed themselves, but its focus on the perfectibility of man through his own self-improvement led some men to believe they could understand and interpret God's design.  This destroyed the unity that had characterised the Mediæval world and brought forth the innovation and individualism that would define the modern world.