The persecution of heretics and the role of secular power at the time of the Reformation

The epoch of the Reformation marked a profound turning point in the religious and political history of Europe, which had far-reaching consequences for dealing with deviant beliefs. While the church institutions were previously primarily responsible for punishing heresy, the balance of power in favor of the secular authorities shifted considerably.This change took place against the background of a divided Christianity, which faced new challenges and was looking for solutions for dealing with people of other faiths. The following consideration examines how the persecution practices developed and the role of the state powers in this. It becomes clear that the supposed freedom of the Reformation oftenled to increased control by the state.

The situation after the beginning of the Reformation

But how did one deal with heretics outside the catchment area of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, especially since the beginning of the Reformation in the year fifteen hundred and seventeen. What had Christianity experienced in the so-called Western Schism with its two popes, namely, that all Christians were excommunicated, from the other Pope,That happened again. The Catholic Church had thrown its bang curse on Luther and Luther wedged back, described the Roman church as the Babylonian whore. Accordingly, everyone was somehow heretics, at least from the point of view of the other side and the respective denomination. So what was to be done if each side considered and condemns the other as heretical.

The paralysis of the church institutions

The church was paralyzed, basically doing nothing and let it go without energetic intervention. American historian William Monter found that wherever one looked, from Scotland to Portugal, episcopal courts and papal inquisitors lacked the means to effectively persecution of heresia. In Germany, the country of origin of the Reformation, theInquisition at its low point and hardly any actionable. Luther had proclaimed the freedom of a Christian man and thus aroused new expectations. Was that now the beginning of religious freedom and a new tolerance.

The takeover by the secular state

It was supposed to be different and the development took an unexpected turn for those involved. Because it was Luther, as the historian Gerd Schwerhoff judges, who made the term blasphemy a label that was almost inflationary. But of course the state came to the scene and interfered in religious matters. So now a phenomenon thathad already announced beforehand and which seems completely incomprehensible to us today. Not the church, but of all things the worldly state that was modernizing and growing in self-confidence, saw itself as an inevitable duty to persecute heretics in the sense of the general public and to severely punish, often even with death, punished.

The establishment of the state obligation to prosecute

However, since pre-Christian times, all authorities had seen this as their task so as not to conjure up the wrath of God on society as a whole. The renowned American historian Edward Peters criticized the fact that state executions on religious matters would like to be overlooked. Thus, a false alternative of tolerant state andInquisitorial Church suggests and distorts reality. It was the cities or the ruling rulers who carried out the punishment of this offense on their own competence and without prior ecclesiastical inquisition. Executions were therefore usually carried out with the sword, as in majesty crimes, and not by fire.

The practice in France and England

This is how it happened in Germany as well as in other countries and regions of Europe. In France, ecclesiastical jurisdiction in trials of blasphemy was practically off and without influence. The royal courts were the ones who claimed responsibility for themselves and who judged the judges. In addition, there was no city or village community there, the blasphemerswould not have been punished, as the French modern historian Alain Cabatous stated in a special investigation. In England, the kings had beheaded and carried out the sentences to the convicts.

The changing denominations of the English Crown

Henry the Eighth had about two hundred and fifty Catholics executed and persecuted the followers of the old faith. His Catholic daughter Maria then three hundred Protestants and reversed the direction of persecution. Her half-sister Elisabeth, the first, finally again one hundred eighty Catholics and continued the persecution. In the year sixteen hundred ninety-seven, fromParliament issued a blasphemy act and tightened the laws. Heretic burn was popular and found support among the population.

The financing of executions by citizens

A London goldsmith belittled money for bundles of brushwood in a testamentary point of insult and thus supported the practice. In this way, the much-famous Reformation release of the political had a questionable side and dark facets. In our eyes, something almost bizarre and strange things came about for the modern understanding. a secular officialInquisition in religious matters established itself and took control. It was not the Catholic Church, but Emperor Charles the Fifth, who, after the Worms edict of twenty-one and twenty-one in the Netherlands, initiated Prosecution Protestant.

The Persecution under Emperor Charles the Fifth

In this persecution, the first Lutherans in Brussels were burned and executed fifteen hundred twenty-three. Four years later, however, it was the same Charles the Fifth, whose troops devastated Rome and besieged the pope in Castel Sant’Angelo. The fact that the reformers in return did not do without heretic persecution and Kettötung by no means should soon be shown by the Anabaptists. thislater built a terror regime in Münster and were generally considered to be a company-dissolving. They rejected any authority and in general any obligation and posed a danger.

The action against the Anabaptist movement

Catholic and Protestant sovereigns immediately took violence against them and persecuted them together. Luther and Melanchthon had expressly advocated and approved the killing of Anabaptists. When the first execution of a Baptist in Catholic Schwyz took place, the next one in Zurich in Zwinglia and followed quickly. Zurich was fifteen hundred twenty-five inpassed a municipal decision to the pure word of God and changed the course. With the Dutch historian Heiko A. Oberman, who teaches in America, the city became a prototype of the urban reformation and a role model.

The execution of Felix Mantz and Balthasar Hubmaier

But Zurich of all places drowned the Anabaptist Felix Mantz fifteen hundred and twenty-seven and carried out the verdict. Fifteen hundred twenty-eight, the later Emperor Ferdinand the first sent the Baptist Balthasar Hubmaier to the stake and had him burn. He had called for fifteen hundred nineteen in Regensburg to persecuted the Jews and then changed his attitude. Then it wasHe became an Anabaptist and had already gone through the torture in Zurich for fifteen hundred and twenty-six and had survived. The Reichstag zu Speyer put the death penalty for the entire empire on Anabaptistry and exacerbated the situation.

Enforcement by state power

This punishment was to be carried out in state-public power perfection and without a church heretic judgment and without church participation. But the death penalty did not only affect the baptist and followers of this particular movement. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the lay judges of Lutheran Leipzig had eight blasphemers beheaded and punished them harshly. also theReformed cities, especially since the Zwinglian, which can be described as God republics, increasingly pursued the offenders and those who were Ahnder. Among the seventy-six and sixteen hundreds of 15-16 people executed in Zurich, fifty-six blasphemers were blasphemers.

Statistics of executions in Zurich

Up to the seventeen hundred and forty-five again twenty-two, according to recent studies, it is said to have been eighty-four and more. A single Protestant city with only about ten thousand inhabitants executed almost as many blasphemers as the ninety-seven, who sentenced the entire Roman Inquisition to death in the same period. Calvin operated inGeneva’s theocracy The burning of the Spaniard Michael Servet, who denied the divine trinity and taught differently. This was fifteen hundred fifty-three with the consent of the Zwinglian and Lutheran authorities and was approved. In Catholic cities, the councilors also persecuted the blasphemers, such as in Cologne and other places.

The comparison of execution numbers

There, however, only one execution can be determined and the numbers were significantly lower. The secular courts in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, England and Scotland condemned to death in the nineteen years from fifteen hundred and twenty-five to fifteen-four-four-three-thirds of eight hundred eight hundred eighty-four. This was three timesAs much as the Spanish Inquisition throughout the Spanish Empire for all passing together in one hundred and sixty years. In the same period, as William Monter notes, the role of the popes with twenty-five death sentences, i.e. less than one percent, remained infinitesimal and hardly worth mentioning. In general, there was generally a certain mitigation and less in the Catholic environmenthardness.

The mitigation in the Catholic area

Because there the breeding of faith and morals was usually first dealt with in the confession and remained in private space. This gave rise to more opportunities to evade public disciplining and to avoid shame. And on the left wing of the Reformation, some now pacifist Anabaptists quietly recalled the weed-wheat parable and urged patience. herspoke out against religious killings, but not always consistently, and rejected violence. Especially the Protestant, but also the Catholic secular authorities, not only took care of heresy.

responsibility for the morality of the citizens

They also took responsibility for the morality of their citizens and oversaw moral behavior. The legal historian Dieter Willoweit stated that every prince, the Protestant and the Catholic, was faced with concern. The sins of his subjects would arouse God’s anger and ensue his punishments and bring mischief. Zurich was the first city to have after the transitionestablished a matrimonial court for the new faith and created new institutions. With the intention, as the New Age historian Francisca Loetz announced, that the council had to ensure a godly life for the subjects.

The Spread of Morality

This should be done in order to avert divine punishments such as epidemics, famines or other disasters and to protect the common good. From Zurich, custom breeding spread to other cities and found imitators. Nowhere else has it been operated as consistently at first as in the equally Protestant city of Konstanz and its surroundings. Where in the years fromfifteen hundred and thirty-two to fifteen hundred and thirty-four at least one thousand and two hundred persons of the city of five thousand inhabitants had to deal with it in some way. But also in the Catholic Münsterland there was the peculiarity of a so-called sending court and its own courts.

The sending court in Münsterland

This was held and met annually in each parish in the name of the bishop, who was also a secular ruler. It served as a moral court and monitored the morality of the population. However, it never imposed a death penalty and stayed with milder punishments. And one more word about book censorship and the handling of written ideas. Book burnings have been around since books were made andwritten records exist.

The History of Book Burning

Even ancient Greece burned blasphemous books and destroyed unwanted writings. Rome, in particular, pursued the emperor’s insults relentlessly and harshly. Judaism also reacted no differently to heretical writings and took action against them. The Christians were initially victims of book destruction when, in the Diocletianic persecution of Christians, theyBooks for destruction. It was precisely they who initially reacted in an astonishingly liberal manner and showed tolerance.

The early Christian stance on censorship

Because the religious historian Wolfgang Speyer points out that even very sporadically lascivious literature seems to have been censored or destroyed. In the Middle Ages, the writings of heretics were always burned and destroyed in heretical cremations. The special book censorship that emerged since the thirteenth century, however, then had a life-saving effect, so to speak, and protectedHuman beings. It was not the human being who was condemned, but only very certain of his published views that were declared to be erroneous. which then had to be deleted and banned.

The new situation through letterpress printing

A completely new situation arose after the invention of printing and especially with the outbreak of the Reformation and the spread of ideas. Which the Protestant church historian Berndt Hamm describes as a media event and saw as a turning point. Not much different than today with the challenge of the new media, the question then arose as to how to deal with the sometimes extremely polemicaland inflammatory floods of scripture. Censorship was generally one of the self-evident and hardly questioned instruments of state and ecclesiastical governance. So that it was also judged predominantly positively by intellectuals, as the church historian Hubert Wolf noted.

The role of universities in censorship

It was the universities that drew up prohibition lists and catalogued the prohibited writings. On which, in particular, writings of the other denomination appeared and were classified as dangerous. However, the humanist Thomas More, who was canonized by the Catholic Church, had already trusted in this. That the power of truth will somedaywill prevail and assert itself. Only the Enlightenment then pleaded for complete freedom of publication and demanded rights.

Modern restrictions on freedom of publication

Even today, we make generally accepted restrictions and set limits. Holocaust denial is a criminal offence and will be prosecuted and punished by law. The fact that book censorship in the Catholic Church existed at least formally until the Second Vatican Council has triggered many a shake of the head. But after all, it is to be credited that the Inquisition and Index Congregation,by being quite consistent against astrology, naturalism and occultism. Involuntarily or unintentionally helped to exclude these elements from the developing natural science and to modernize them, as Hubert Wolf noted.