The Press, the Princes and the Property

John Wycliffe held that scripture outranked the church, that the papacy had no biblical warrant, and that the Eucharist did not work the way Rome said it did. He died in his bed in 1384. Jan Hus held substantially the same positions and was burned in 1415.

Martin Luther held them in 1517 and Europe split.

The difference is not the theology. Almost every one of Luther's positions had been articulated before by someone the church had successfully contained. What changed was the infrastructure, and the politics.

Start with the press. By 1517 a printer could produce a short vernacular pamphlet in a few days and thousands of copies could be circulating within weeks, and Luther wrote for exactly that format, prolifically, in punchy German, with woodcuts. Something in the region of a third of all books printed in German in the 1520s were his. Wycliffe's ideas travelled at the speed of a hand-copied manuscript, which is the speed at which an institution can catch up with them.

Then the politics. Frederick the Wise of Saxony protected Luther, and German princes generally had standing grievances about money leaving for Rome and about jurisdictions they did not control. Once it became clear that adopting the reform meant acquiring monastic lands, church courts and clerical appointments, the calculation for a territorial prince was not purely spiritual.

Which is the thing most often left out. The Reformation was among the largest transfers of property in European history. In England the dissolution of the monasteries moved perhaps a quarter of the land in the kingdom, most of it sold on to gentry who thereby acquired a permanent material interest in the settlement never being reversed, arguably the single most effective piece of politics in the whole episode. Across Germany and Scandinavia, similar transfers put church wealth into princely hands.

None of this makes the theology insincere. It makes the map of who converted intelligible, which the theology alone does not.

The opening move is worth examining as a piece of tactics, because it is so well chosen. Indulgences were, doctrinally, a remission of temporal punishment for sin drawing on the merits of the saints: a subtle enough idea. What people encountered was a preacher with a revenue target, printed certificates, and money going to Rome to build St Peter's while the parish roof leaked. Attacking that required no theological training to follow, connected an abstract dispute about authority to visible cash leaving Germany, and forced the church to defend its worst practice rather than its best argument.

Reform movements very often start at the point where doctrine has become most visibly a commercial product. That is not an accident of this case.

The settlement, when it came, is worth reading carefully for what it does not say. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 ended the first round of German religious war on the principle cuius regio, eius religio: the ruler's religion is the territory's. Subjects who disagreed were permitted to emigrate.

That is a treaty between princes about jurisdiction. It contains no individual right of conscience whatsoever. Religious toleration as something belonging to persons rather than to states is a later and separate development, and it took the Thirty Years War, which killed a startling proportion of the German population, before even the princely version held reliably.

Finally, the response, which is the most underrated part of the story. The Catholic Church's counter-reformation was not primarily military. The Council of Trent restated contested doctrine and, more consequentially, imposed administrative discipline that had been demanded by reformers inside the church for a century: seminaries to train priests properly, bishops required to actually live in their dioceses, parish registers, a standardised liturgy. The new orders, the Jesuits above all, built schools and missions on a global scale and became the best-educated clergy in Europe.

It worked. Catholicism recovered substantial ground, and it did so mainly by fixing the failures its critics had named.

Which is the transferable lesson, and it applies well outside religion. An institution facing a competitor tries censorship first (the Index of Prohibited Books) and censorship requires control of the entire distribution area, which nobody had across a fragmented Germany where a banned text simply printed in the next territory. What eventually worked was competing in the same medium and repairing the underlying grievance. It took about forty years to reach that conclusion, which is roughly how long it usually takes.