Luther and the Reformation

The story

A restless monk

Martin Luther was born in 1483 at Eisleben, in Germany, into a family of miners who grew wealthy over time. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but in 1505, caught in a violent thunderstorm, Luther promised to become a monk if he survived. He entered the Augustinian monastery, studied theology and became a professor at the University of Wittenberg, a small town in Saxony. He was a conscientious man, tormented by the fear of not being good enough for God.

Studying the Bible, and in particular the letters of St Paul, Luther arrived at an idea that changed his life: salvation is not earned through works or payments, but is a free gift of God, received through faith. For this reason he began to find some practices of the Church of his time wrong.

Indulgences

In 1517 a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, was travelling round Germany selling indulgences: documents by which, in exchange for a gift of money, the Church promised to reduce the punishments for sins, even for dead relatives. The money was meant partly to finance the building of the new basilica of St Peter's in Rome and partly to pay the debts of an archbishop, Albert of Brandenburg. Luther thought this practice scandalous, because it gave the impression that forgiveness could be bought.

On 31 October 1517 Luther wrote ninety-five theses, that is, short sentences in Latin, inviting people to discuss indulgences in public, and sent them to the archbishop. A tradition, which began some years later, says that he nailed them to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg: historians are not sure it happened exactly like that. But someone had them printed and translated into German, and within a few weeks they were read all over Germany.

“Here I stand”

Pope Leo X at first gave the matter no importance, then asked Luther to take back his words. Luther refused. In 1520 he wrote some books in which he denied the authority of the Pope and criticised the sacraments, and in January 1521 he was excommunicated. He was then summoned to Worms, in Germany, before the emperor Charles V and the princes of the Empire, for the Diet, that is the assembly, of 1521. There, on 18 April, in front of everyone, he again refused to take back his words. The story goes that he ended with the words “Here I stand, I can do no other”, but historians doubt that he really said them.

The emperor declared him an outlaw, but Luther was protected by Prince Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who had him kidnapped and hidden in Wartburg Castle. There, disguised as a knight, Luther translated the New Testament into German in a few months. The translation, published in 1522, was hugely successful and helped to fix the written German language.

After Luther

Luther's ideas spread quickly thanks to printing, with pamphlets, songs and prints. Princes, towns and peasants took them up, sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes for political ones. In 1524–1525 the German peasants rebelled against their lords, and Luther, alarmed, wrote against them. In 1525 Luther married a former nun, Katharina von Bora, and they had six children.

The religious divisions led to decades of wars. With the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 it was agreed that each German prince could choose the religion of his subjects, Catholic or Lutheran. Luther died at Eisleben in 1546. In his life he also wrote things that we judge harshly today, such as violent attacks on Jews: they are a part of his story that historians do not hide.