Battle of Mühlberg

Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther (1483-1546) inaugurated the Protestant Reformation in 1517. He was born in Eisleben, Saxony to Hans and Margaret Ziegler Luther. Luther taught at the new University of Wittenberg from 1508 to 1546 and received a doctorate of theology in 1512. Luther’s intent was to reform the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but the firm resistance of the church led to the permanent division of Western Christianity.

The seriousness with which Luther took his religious vocation led him into a severe personal crisis: how, he wondered, is it possible to reconcile the demands of God's law with human inability to live up to the law? He found his answer in the New Testament book of Romans: God had, in the obedience of Jesus, reconciled humanity to Himself. What was required of mankind, therefore, was not strict adherence to law or the fulfilment of religious obligations, but a response of faith that accepted what God had done. Such faith would lead to an obedience based on love, not fear. On Oct. 31, 1517, Luther nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg a list of 95 theses, or propositions. They denied the right of Pope Leo X to forgive sins by the sale of indulgences, among other challenges. Without Luther’s knowledge his words were published on the newly invented Gutenberg press and distributed throughout Germany.

The pope ordered Luther to appear before Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg, who demanded that Luther retract all he had said. Luther refused to do this unless it could be proven from the Bible that he was wrong. In 1521 the pope excommunicated Luther and sought Emperor Charles V to enforce it. Instead the emperor called a “diet (council)” at Worms and demanded Luther to recant, which he refused. With the help of his friend the elector of Saxony, Luther hid in the castle of Wartburg, near Eisenach, where he remained in disguise. During his time he translated the New Testament into German. Eventually the emperor's preoccupation with the war in France made it safe for Luther to return to his work at Wittenberg. While Luther was in concealment some of his followers had carried the reform movement further than he had intended. On Luther's return he tried to correct these excesses but was not successful. In 1524 many of the German peasants used his teachings as a reason for revolting. In 1525 Luther married a former nun, thereby rejecting monasticism and celibacy for the clergy. The remainder of Luther's life was spent in writing, preaching, and organizing the reformed church in Saxony. He replaced the Latin service of the mass with a service in the German language and wrote many hymns that are still in use.

Philosophy Professor (2006), 'Martin Luther,' www.philosophyprofessor.com/philosophers/ Bates, Laurence (2006), 'Martin Luther,' www.educ.msu.edu Elliff, Jim (2002), 'Martin Luther,' www.ccwonline.org/luther.html

Schmalkaldic League

The Schmalkaldic League was a defensive league of Protestant princes in the Holy Roman Empire. The League was assembled by Philipp I of Hesse and John Frederick, Elector of Saxony at Schmalkalden in 1531, pledging to defend each other if their territories were attacked by Charles V. The League agreed to provide 10,000 troops and 2,000 knights for their mutual protection. In 1532, the League allied with France, and in 1538 with Denmark. The League rarely provoked Charles directly, but confiscated Church land, expelled bishops and Catholic princes, and helped spread Lutheranism throughout northern Germany. In 1544, Charles V made peace with France, with France agreeing to end their alliance. Charles and Pope Paul III began to gather an army in 1546, while the members of the League bickered amongst themselves, unable to unite in defence as they had originally planned. After a series of battles in 1538, the Pope, King Francis, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V all agreed to a ten years’ truce at Nice.

Battle of Mühlberg

The truce agreement with the Pope and Charles V drove the Protestants to rebellion. They were crushed at the Battle of Mühlberg on the 24th of April 1547 by the army of Charles V. Infantry of Charles was 13,000 versus 7,000 and Cavalry numbered 4,100 versus 3,000. Charles V inflicted losses of 7,000 men while sacrificing only 200. The Schmalkaldic league suffered mainly due to the indecisiveness of its officers in agreeing to battlefield actions. Their defences were weak and easily defeated by the Emperors Army in the heavy early morning mist. The matchlock musket was the weapon of choice during this era. The Battle of Mühlberg is the first confirmed case of its use. The musket had to be fired from a lying prone position, as it was three to four feet in length firing a ball of .3 - .7 inch. 10 men per 100 in Spanish companies carried them. At Mühlberg they were utilised to turn a flank at a prodigious distance across the river whereby the enemy had believed secure.

Geocities.com (2007), 'Battle of Mühlberg,' www.geocities.com/aow1617/MuehlbergUK.html

Left: Depicition of Charles V's forces crossing the bridge at the Battle of Mühlberg (Der Brückenschlag bei Mühlberg, drawn circa 1596-1598, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart)

Above: Postcards commemorating the Battle.

Holy Roman Emperor Charles V

This Battle of Mühlberg essentially reclaimed Germany for the Holy Roman Empire. Just one year after the death of Martin Luther, Lutherans were in danger of being suppressed altogether throughout Germany. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s biography reveals the significance of the Battle of Mühlberg:

The ecclesiastical policy of Charles was Roman Catholic without being ultra montane. He kept his coronation oath. All his antecedents were in favour of the traditional faith. Ecclesiastics and monks surrounded him. He was thoroughly imbued with the Spanish type of piety, of which his grandmother is the noblest and purest representative. Isabella the Catholic, the greatest of Spanish sovereigns, “the queen of earthly queens.” conquered the Moors, patronized the discoverer of America, expelled the Jews, and established the Inquisition, — all for the glory of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic religion. A genuine Spaniard believes, with Gonzalo of Oviedo, that “powder against the infidels is incense to the Lord.” With him, as with his Moorish antipode, the measure of conviction is the measure of intolerance, and persecution the evidence of zeal. The burning of heretics became in the land of the Inquisition a sacred festival, an “act of faith;” and such horrid spectacles were in the reign of Philip II, as popular as the bull-fights which still flourish in Spain, and administer to the savage taste for blood. Charles heard the mass daily, listened to a sermon on Sunday and holy days, confessed and communed four times a year, and was sometimes seen in his tent at midnight on his knees before the crucifix. He never had any other conception of Christianity than the Roman-Catholic, and took no time to investigate theological questions.
He fully approved of the Pope's bull against Luther, and ordered it to be executed in the Netherlands. In his retreat at Yuste, he expressed regret that he had kept his promise of safe-conduct; in other words, that he had not burned the heretic at Worms, as Sigismund had burned Hus at Constance. He never showed the least sympathy with the liberal tendencies of the age, and regarded Protestantism as a rebellion against Church and State. He would have crushed it out if he had had the power; but it was too strong for him, and he needed the Protestant support for his wars against France, and against the Turks. He began in the Netherlands that fearful persecution which was carried on by his more bigoted son, Philip II, but it provoked the uprising of the people, and ended in the establishment of the Dutch Republic. He subdued the Lutheran league in the Schmalkaldian war; pale as death, but trusting in God, he rushed into the hottest of the fight at Muehlberg, and greeted the decisive victory of 1547 with the words: “I came, I saw, and God conquered.” But the height of his power was the beginning of his decline. The same Saxon Elector, Moritz, who had aided him against the Protestant princes, turned against him in 1552, and secured in the treaty of Passau, for the first time, some degree of legal toleration to the Lutherans in Germany.
While Charles was a strict Roman Catholic from the beginning to the end of his life, he was, nevertheless, by no means a blind and slavish papist. Like his predecessors on the German throne, be maintained the dignity and the sovereignty of the state against the claims of hierarchical supremacy. He hated the French, or neutral, politics of the papal court. His troops even captured Rome, and imprisoned Clement VII., who had formed a league with Francis I. against him (1527). He quarrelled with Pope Paul Ill., who in turn severely protested against his tolerant or hesitating policy towards the Protestants in Germany. He says, in his Autobiography, that “the Pope's emissaries, and some ecclesiastics, were incessantly endeavouring to induce him to take up arms against the Protestants (tomar as armas contra os protestantes),” but that he “hesitated on account of the greatness and difficulty of such an enterprise.”
Moreover, Charles had a certain zeal for a limited reformation of church discipline on the basis of the Catholic doctrine and the papal hierarchy. He repeatedly urged a general council, against the dilatory policy of the Popes, and exhorted Protestants and Catholics alike to submit to its decisions as final. Speaking of the Diet of Augsburg, held in 1530, he says that he, asked his Holiness to convoke and assemble a general council, as most important and necessary to remedy what was taking place in Germany, and the errors that were being propagated throughout Christendom. This was likewise consistent with Spanish tradition. Isabella the Catholic, and Cardinal Ximenes, had endeavoured to reform the clergy and monks in Spain. This Roman-Catholic reformation was effected by the Council of Trent, but turned out to be a papal counter-reformation, and a weapon against Protestantism in the hands of the Spanish order of the Jesuits.
Charles and Luther saw each other once, and only once, at the Diet of Worms. The Emperor was disgusted with the monk who dared to set his private judgement and conscience against the time-honoured creed of Christendom, and declared that he would never make him a heretic. But Luther wrote him a respectful letter of thanks for his safe-conduct. Twenty years later, after his victory over John Frederick of Saxony at Muehlberg on the Elbe (April 24, 1547), Charles stood on the grave of Luther in the castle church of Wittenberg. Bloodthirsty Duke of Alva advised him to dig up and burn the bones of the arch-heretic, and to scatter the ashes to the winds of heaven but he declined with the noble words, “I make war on the living, not on the dead.” This was his nearest approach to religious toleration. However, the interesting incident is not sufficiently authenticated.
For twenty-six years the Emperor and the Reformer stood at the head of Germany, the one as a political, the other as a religious, leader; working in opposite directions, — the one for the preservation of the old, the other for the creation of the new, order of things. The one had the army and treasure of a vast empire at his command; the other had nothing but his faith and pen, and yet made a far deeper and more lasting impression on his and on future ages. Luther died peacefully in his birthplace, trusting in the merits of Christ, and commending his soul to the God who redeemed him. Ten years later Charles ended his life as a monk in Spain, holding a burning candle in the right hand, and pressing with the left the crucifix to his lips, while the Archbishop of Toledo intoned the Psalm De Profundis. The last word of the dying Emperor was “Jesus.”
Christian Classics Ethereal Library (2005), 'Holy Roman Emperor Charles V,' Christian Classics Ethereal Library, www.ccel.org

Recognition of Protestantism

The power of Austria was never greater than after the victory, which Charles V gained over the Lutherans at Mühlberg. With the treaty of Schmalkald the freedom of Germany lay, as it seemed, prostrate forever, but it revived under Maurice of Saxony when he defeated Emperor Charles V in 1552, once its most formidable enemy. All the fruits of the victory of Mühlberg were lost again in the congress of Passau, and the diet of Augsburg 1555 and every scheme for civil and religious oppression terminated in the concessions of an equitable peace giving Protestantism legal recognition. Following this, Emperor Charles V attempted to reconcile the differences between the Roman Catholics and the Lutherans through a system of Theology prepared by his order. It was though rejected by both faiths. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806.

Fest, Wilfried (1978), 'Dictionary of Germany 1806-1945,' Georg Prior Publishers, London, UK, p.185

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