2. The Protestant Reformation
Where Wat Tyler’s war was violent, Martin Luther’s would be much more symbolic. Well, to begin with at least. Some 500 years ago this year in the small German city of Wittenberg, the founder of Protestantism nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Cathedral in defiance of the Catholic order of the time, which he saw as debased, decadent and corrupt.
He was particularly peeved by the selling of plenary indulgences – wherein one could give money to the Church in exchange for the forgiveness of sins – which Luther saw as tantamount to buying the grace of God. Priests were often those who could buy positions, rather than those best qualified for the role, and in a world where few spoke Latin and thus needed clergy to translate the scriptures, this lead to severe variations in teaching.
Luther’s goal was to bring religion to the masses and to return the Church to piety: his Reformation, as it became known, was an attempt to reform the Church to its prior state. What emerged, however, was a revolution, in which those who were disenfranchised by the religious status quo flocked to the new Protestantism, in which all were equal before God, and against the hierarchical nature of Catholicism.
What had begun with a symbolic act designed to spark an academic debate of the nature of the Church had mushroomed into a movement that could challenge the dominance of Rome. The printing press, which had only recently been invented, allowing for the dissemination of ideas in the vernacular tongue, which in turn gave thousands the opportunity to read the scriptures for themselves for the very first time.
Huge wars broke out between those who had adopted Protestant ideas and those loyal to the Catholic Church, with the whole of Europe split. To this day, countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic remain predominantly Protestant – not to mention the thousands of Protestant Pilgrims who moved to the United States in this period – while other states such as Ireland, France, Spain and Italy are Catholic.
The Protestant Reformation was a protest against the prevailing order of the time, an exercise of ideas against authority, and one that used the technological developments of the age – specifically the printed word – to spread a new ideology, one that has gone on to have a monumental impact on the way in which the modern world worships.