Unit Four · What Got Built With It · Lesson 27

The Church Splits, and the Poor Lose Again

The Reformation is the great hero story of Protestant history. What happened to the poor people in it?

About 7 minutes11 deeper sections

Words to Know

Elector — one of seven princes who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. Three of them were archbishops.

Peasant — a farmer working land he does not own.

Dissolution — the closing down of the monasteries and the seizure of everything they owned.

Almshouse — a house where the old and poor of a parish were given a room and kept.

It started when a man bought a job.

In 1514 a young German nobleman named Albrecht of Brandenburg, about twenty-four and already holding two church posts, wanted a third. It was Mainz, and the Archbishop of Mainz was one of the seven electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. He was buying a vote. He got it by paying a very large fee, twenty-odd thousand ducats; the sources differ on the exact figure. ¹ He borrowed it from a bank, the house of Fugger in Augsburg, run by Jakob Fugger, the richest man in Europe.

To repay the loan, Pope Leo X allowed him in 1515 to run an indulgence campaign in his lands. The terms were written down in advance: half the proceeds to Rome, for the building of the new basilica of Saint Peter, and half to Albrecht, to repay the Fuggers. ²

Go deeperTwo rules he broke, and what came next

Albrecht already held two other posts, and the lesson leaves them unnamed: Magdeburg, which he held outright, and Halberstadt, which he administered. A third broke the rules twice over, since he was too young for church office and no man was supposed to hold more than one.

This was not vanity. Mainz meant a seat at the table where an emperor was made, in a decade when the old emperor was visibly dying and everyone expected a contested election. That is exactly what happened. The emperor died in 1519, and Albrecht cast his vote.

Here is the machine from Lesson 25, running.

The preacher was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican. The line that has survived four centuries is his jingle: As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. The printed price list set the rate by rank, from kings at the top to one coin from a tradesman. And the Fuggers sent their own agent to travel with the preacher, holding a key to the chest and taking the bank’s share out at the source. ³ ⁴ Rome’s half paid for Saint Peter’s, where Pope Julius II had pulled down a basilica that had stood for twelve hundred years in order to build something greater.

So the transaction, stated in full: a farmer’s coin, taken in a German village, split down the middle between a bank in Augsburg, collecting on the loan that bought a young nobleman an electoral vote,, and a construction site in Rome.

Everybody in that sentence knew the terms except the farmer.

Go deeperThe price list in full, and Rome's debts

The farmer only saw a preacher pass through town. Tetzel was an experienced and highly effective indulgence commissary, and he arrived with the papal bull carried ahead of him on a cloth, bells ringing, a procession out to meet him, and he preached in the marketplace about the dead.

The order in that price list ran deeper than kings at the top and a tradesman's coin at the bottom. Between them came abbots, counts and barons, then lesser nobles and senior clergy, then merchants and townsmen with income of their own. For the genuinely destitute, it asked instead for prayer and fasting, because they had nothing to give.

Picture a woman in a German market town, with a dead husband and a real fear for where he is, walking up and putting money in the chest. Standing beside it, holding one of the keys, is an employee of a bank in Augsburg, entering the sum in a ledger.

Rome's half was paying off more than a building project. Julius II began it in 1506, and his architect was nicknamed "the Wrecker" in Rome at the time; the new building would not be finished for over a century. Leo X inherited the hole in the ground and the bills. He spent lavishly and was chronically short of money.

In 1517 a monk objected.

A university monk named Martin Luther wrote out ninety-five objections, most of them about exactly that racket, and sent them on 31 October 1517 to Albrecht himself. Whether he also nailed a copy to a church door is not certain. The letters are certain. The nail is not.

It is honest to add one thing. Luther’s own prince, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, displayed a relic collection whose indulgence came to over a million years off purgatory, and the offerings helped fund Luther’s university. Frederick had banned Tetzel from Saxony, because Tetzel was competition. ⁵

But Luther was right, and I want to say so clearly. Forgiveness is not for sale. He translated the Bible into German so ordinary people could read it. And he asked why the pope, richer than the richest men in history, did not build Saint Peter’s with his own money instead of the money of poor believers. The printing press meant that this time the argument could not be contained.

Go deeperThe bishop, the nail story, and the relics

The letters carried further than one man. Luther sent his objections not only to Albrecht but to his own bishop as well. The nail story comes from a colleague's account, written down only after Luther's death; Luther himself never mentions it.

The timing was not an accident. The very next day, 1 November, was All Saints' Day, when Frederick the Wise put his relic collection on public display at the castle church in Wittenberg. That collection ran to some nineteen thousand holy fragments, and people came from miles away to leave their offerings there.

Luther's patron was running a smaller version of the same business, and he protected Luther for as long as he lived.

His German Bible was translated so well it helped shape the language itself. And the objection about the pope's wealth was not a stray complaint. It was written into the ninety-five theses themselves, and they were in print within weeks, spread across Germany within months.

Here is why it worked when Hus had failed.

In 1521, at Worms, Luther refused, before the emperor Charles V, to take back what he had written, and was declared an outlaw. Frederick the Wise had him seized on the road by masked horsemen and hidden in a castle. Then the princes worked out what was in it for them. If your territory left Rome, the money stopped leaving, the church lands inside your borders became yours, and you appointed the clergy. By the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the law was that whoever rules the territory decides its religion. ⁶

It succeeded because this time the men with armies stood to gain.

Go deeperThe Wartburg, the Teutonic Order and Hus's fate

Being declared an outlaw was not a formality: it meant anyone might kill him and nobody might shelter him. That is why Frederick's staged kidnapping mattered. Masked horsemen took him from the road and hid him in a castle called the Wartburg, where he spent eleven weeks translating the New Testament into German.

What the princes gained had names. Annates, fees, dispensations and a cut of every indulgence campaign had flowed out to Rome for centuries; leaving stopped that at the border. Monasteries, abbeys and bishoprics inside a prince's own territory, six hundred years of accumulated holdings, became his, with nobody left above him to object. And under the Peace of Augsburg, the people themselves had only two choices: conform to their prince's religion, or emigrate.

In 1525 the head of the Teutonic Order, a military religious order that ruled Prussia, announced he was now a Lutheran, dissolved the order's own rule, and turned its territory into a hereditary duchy for himself. He asked Luther's advice first, and Luther told him to do it.

This is also the answer to why it worked when the English reformer Wycliffe, and then Hus, had not. It was not that the argument was better; Hus made most of the same arguments, and was burned for them.

And then the farmers did the arithmetic.

If the Bible was the authority, and not the bishop, then the peasants would open the Bible and look at their own situation. In March 1525 they wrote the Twelve Articles, and something like twenty-five thousand copies were in print inside two months. ⁷ They asked to choose their own pastor, to have the tithe used for the pastor and the village poor, to use the woods and water, and not to be serfs. They built that on Paul: you were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men (1 Corinthians 7:23). They attached scripture to every demand and offered to withdraw any that was shown to be contrary to it. ⁸

Go deeperMemmingen, the missing demands, and their own words

The document itself came from the town of Memmingen, drafted by a journeyman furrier working with a preacher, and it became one of the first documents of its kind ever mass-produced.

There were more demands than the ones just named. They asked to dismiss a pastor who behaved badly, not just choose him. They asked for the grain tithe to be administered by elected men of the village, and to be freed from a separate small tithe on livestock, which they said was a human invention. Their claim on the woods and water meant the right to hunt, fish and take firewood, which lords had been enclosing. They asked for an end to labour services being increased at a lord's will, and for rents set at a fair rate. And they asked that when a man died, his family keep his inheritance: custom let a lord take the best beast or the best garment from a dead tenant's widow, as a fee.

Their own words on serfdom survive. It had been the custom for men to hold them as property, they wrote, which is pitiable enough, considering that Christ has redeemed and bought us all with his precious blood, the shepherd as well as the highest, none excepted.

Here is what Luther wrote back.

At first he blamed the lords too. Then the country went up, and in May 1525 he published Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. He wrote that anyone who can should smite, slay and stab, as one would kill a mad dog, and that it was a time not for mercy but for the sword. ⁹ ¹⁰

On 15 May 1525, at Frankenhausen, something like six thousand peasants were killed in a matter of hours. The princes’ dead were counted in single figures. The peasants’ preacher, Thomas Müntzer, was beheaded on 27 May. He was not a gentle man. He got many people killed by promising them God would protect them. But he is the one preacher in Germany who stood where the peasants stood. Across the whole rising, as many as one hundred thousand died. ¹¹

Luther was frightened, and he had powerful princes protecting him. Those are reasons. They are not a defense. A man told ordinary people to read the Bible for themselves, and when they read it and reached a conclusion about their own poverty, he sided with the men who owned the land.

Go deeperTwo pamphlets, Müntzer's creed, and the long aftermath

Luther's first pamphlet actually blamed the lords: in April 1525 he published an Admonition to Peace, telling the princes their own greed had caused this and telling the peasants not to take up arms.

The second pamphlet went much further than "smite, slay and stab." He wrote that nothing is more poisonous or devilish than a rebel, and that a prince who died putting down the revolt was a blessed martyr before God. He told rulers this was their duty, and that they could be saved by doing it.

At Frankenhausen the peasant army, several thousand strong, faced the combined forces of three princes: professional troops, cavalry and artillery against farmers armed with farm tools and a few guns.

Their preacher, Thomas Müntzer, had started as one of Luther's own followers and gone much further, preaching that the poor were the instrument God would use and that the hour had come. He was found hiding after the battle, tortured and beheaded along with a number of others. The reason you have likely never heard his name is that the side that won wrote the history.

Perhaps three hundred thousand people took part in the rising, and the killing did not stop at the battlefield. Afterward came executions, burned villages, blindings and fines that ruined whoever survived.

Luther was watching a continent come apart, and he believed his whole reform would be destroyed if it were tied to a peasant army.

The poor lost in a slower way too.

The Reformation transferred the charity system of Europe to the men who were already rich, and did not replace it. England is the clearest case.

1534–35: The English king breaks with Rome and surveys the income of every religious house.
1536–40: Around eight hundred monasteries are dissolved, and the land is sold to nobles, gentry and merchants.
1545 and 1547: The chantries, which often ran the village school and guild charity, go too.
1547: A new law orders a vagrant branded with a V and made a slave for two years.
1572: Vagrants over fourteen are to be whipped and bored through the ear.
1598 and 1601: The Poor Laws create a compulsory poor rate, a tax to rebuild what had been sold. ¹²

The monasteries had run the almshouses, given food at the gate on fixed days, and taken in travellers, from permanent endowments that no landlord could withdraw in a bad year. All of it stopped in about four years.

Go deeperCommissioners, the crown's cut, and a repealed law

Behind that timeline was a real mechanism. In 1534 the king made himself head of the church in England, and the next year he sent commissioners out to draw up a complete valuation of the income of every religious house in the country. You do not measure something that carefully unless you intend to take it.

When the roughly eight hundred houses were dissolved, the gold, and the lead off their roofs, went straight to the crown, and a new government department was created just to handle the land. The land itself was not kept; it was sold, to pay for the king's wars in France and Scotland, and within about ten years the great bulk of it had passed into private hands.

The chantries that followed were not grand institutions. They were endowments left by ordinary people to pay a priest to say masses for their dead, built up over generations as the village's own accumulated savings. Those same priests often ran the local hospital as well as the school, and the monasteries' doles at the gate were an obligation written into their own foundation, not charity at anyone's discretion.

Even the punishment came in stages. The 1547 law that ordered a vagrant branded and enslaved for two years was so savage that it was repealed three years later.

Now the strongest objection, and it is a real one. Historians who have gone through the 1535 survey find that alms were only a few percent of monastic income. That is true, and some houses were scandals. But a few percent was still, in most English villages, the only organized relief that existed. And if monasteries spent too little on the poor, the endowment could have been directed to the poor. Some reformers argued for exactly that. Instead it was sold to the gentry, and many of those families still had the land three hundred years later.

That is what “the poor lose again” means. It was not one massacre. It was a transfer. ¹³

Now put my own words against that pamphlet.

I said: blessed are you who are poor. And in the same passage, the half that nobody reads aloud: woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation (Luke 6:20–25). I said that whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me (Matthew 25:40). And I said: you cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24).

Go deeperThe fuller blessing, and what it means

The blessing continues further than the part you were given: "for yours is the kingdom of God," and "blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be filled." The warning matches it line for line: "woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry" (Luke 6:20–25). Delivered as a blessing and a warning in matched pairs, this was never a sentiment about humility. It was a statement about whose side I am on in that fight.

Read that literally, and a pamphlet instructing princes to stab and slay peasants stops being a political misjudgment. It becomes something addressed to me (Matthew 25:40).

The same literal reading answers the pamphlet's cruelty: cannot is not a preference. It is a statement about what is possible, not a suggestion (Matthew 6:24).

And then came two centuries of war.

Once there were two official versions of the faith, the killing became political. On Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, after the French king’s council decided to kill the Protestant leaders, crowds in Paris killed Protestants for three days, and it spread. The numbers are disputed; most counts put the total between five and ten thousand. In Rome, the pope had a commemorative medal struck. ¹⁴ ¹⁵ From 1618 to 1648 the Thirty Years’ War cost the German lands an estimated fifteen to thirty percent of their people, mostly through hunger and disease. And in 1631 a cardinal, Richelieu, had Catholic France pay Protestant Sweden to fight the Catholic Habsburgs. ¹⁶ Religion was the flag. The war was about power.

Go deeperColigny, Prague's window, and the sack of Magdeburg

The killing in Paris had a specific trigger. That August, the French crown had married a Catholic princess to the Protestant king of Navarre, drawing the Huguenot leadership into the city in large numbers. On 22 August someone tried to assassinate their commander, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, and only wounded him. The Huguenot nobility demanded justice loudly, in a Catholic city, and the court panicked at what would happen once they got it.

On the night of 23 August the king's council decided to kill the Huguenot leaders. Before dawn the next day, Coligny was killed in his bed and thrown out the window; the city militia and crowds took it from there, and the violence spread to a dozen provincial cities over the following weeks. In Rome, the pope also had a Te Deum sung in thanksgiving and commissioned a painting of the killing for a wall in the Vatican, where it still hangs.

The German war began the same way, with one dramatic act: on 23 May 1618, Protestant nobles in Prague threw two royal officials out of a castle window, and the quarrel escalated into thirty years of general war.

Hunger and disease did most of that killing, and here is how it worked: the armies fed themselves off the country and did not carry supplies. They levied "contributions" of cash and food under threat of burning, so an army moving through a district was a tax collector armed with artillery. Seed grain was eaten, plough oxen taken, fields left unsown and barns burned, so the harvest failed on purpose, again and again. Typhus and plague then travelled with the armies among the starving and displaced. At Magdeburg in May 1631, an imperial army took the city and burned it; of about twenty-five thousand people, some twenty thousand died, and it became the most notorious single event of the whole war.

Richelieu's arrangement was put in writing: as chief minister of France, he signed a treaty committing Catholic France to pay Protestant Sweden a subsidy of a million livres a year, and France later entered the war directly, on the Protestant side.

Protestants burned people too.

In Zurich in 1527 the city council drowned Felix Manz for baptizing adults. In Geneva in 1553 Michael Servetus was burned alive, with the agreement of John Calvin. A scholar named Sebastian Castellio answered: to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine. It is to kill a man. He was attacked by every major Protestant authority of his day and died poor. ¹⁷

Go deeperZurich's cruel joke, Münster's cages, and Calvin's mercy

Zurich's method for killing Felix Manz was chosen as a joke about his beliefs: he had baptized adults who had already been baptized as infants, so on 5 January 1527 the city council had him tied and drowned in the river running through the city itself. He wanted water; they gave him water. He was the first Protestant executed by other Protestants for his faith, in a Protestant city, with that city's own leading reformer supporting the policy.

Zurich was not the worst of it. In Münster, in 1534 and 1535, a radical Anabaptist group seized the city, and the experiment turned genuinely terrible from the inside. It was besieged and crushed, and its leaders were tortured to death with hot tongs in the marketplace, their bodies hung afterward in iron cages from the church tower. Those cages are still hanging there; you can stand in the square in Münster today and look up at them.

In Geneva, Michael Servetus was a Spanish physician burned alive on 27 October 1553 for denying the Trinity and infant baptism. Calvin had actually asked that he be beheaded instead, as a mercy; the council refused him.

Castellio published his answer the following year, a book arguing that no one should be killed for their beliefs at all, and he lost his position for it.

Here are the people who read it right.

In April 1649, in the hunger year after the king was executed, a group of poor men walked onto common land at Saint George’s Hill in Surrey and began digging and planting. They took no weapons. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, said the earth was made to be a common treasury for all. They were called the Diggers. Local landholders trampled their crops and burned their houses. And at Cobham in April 1650, the man who finished them off was the local lord of the manor, who was also the parish minister. ¹⁸ ¹⁹

Go deeperThe context, and how they were crushed

The timing was not random. The king had been executed three months earlier, in January 1649, and for a season it looked as if the old order had fallen over completely. The harvest of 1648 had failed and grain prices were the highest anyone could remember, while landlords across England were enclosing common ground, putting up hedges around land where villagers had always had the right to graze an animal, gather wood and glean.

Winstanley went further than that one line: the poor, he said, had as much right to dig the earth as anyone.

The repression was not limited to trampled crops and burned houses. Their carts were smashed. Men were beaten, and some were taken to court at Kingston, where they were not permitted to plead without a lawyer they could not afford. The general of the army came out to look at them and concluded they were harmless, which did not help them at all.

At Cobham the man who finished them off came with hired men of his own, and he was burning down the houses of poor men who were planting food on waste ground and quoting scripture back at him.

What they were doing was in the book that minister preached from. The first believers held everything in common, and there was not a needy person among them (Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35).

That is four chapters into the history of my movement. Winstanley had read it. So had the minister who burned his house.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Luke 6:20–25. Read all six verses, not just the first three.

Then look up: Acts 2:44–45 and 1 Corinthians 7:23 — what the first believers did with their property, and the verse behind the peasants’ third article.

For the history:

The Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia, March 1525. Read the twelfth article, where they offer to withdraw any demand disproved from scripture.

Luther, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, May 1525, in Luther’s Works, volume 46.

The Valor Ecclesiasticus, 1535, the survey of monastic income, and the Poor Relief Act of 1601. Ask what happened in between.

The Short Version

The indulgence sale Luther attacked was repaying a bank loan for Albrecht’s purchase of Mainz.

Luther was right, and his reform worked because the princes profited from leaving Rome.

The peasants cited scripture; Luther told the princes to smite, slay and stab.

England sold the monastic endowments to the gentry and then whipped the poor.

Castellio and the Diggers read my words right, and were ruined for it.

Think About It

What do you do when someone tells you to read the Bible yourself, and then does not like your conclusion?

The monastic endowments could have been redirected to the poor. They were sold to the gentry instead. Who made that choice, and who benefited for the next three hundred years?

Sources for this lesson

Every numbered note in the text points here, so nothing has to be taken on trust.

Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490-1545) was already archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of Halberstadt when he was elected to Mainz in 1514, in breach of the canonical rules on minimum age and on holding more than one see. The archbishop of Mainz was one of the seven prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire; Albrecht voted in the imperial election of 1519 that chose Charles V. The sums recorded for the dispensation and the pallium vary between sources; figures of 10,000 ducats for the dispensation and 14,000 for the pallium are commonly cited, with other accounts giving totals between about 21,000 and 29,000. ↩
Albrecht of Brandenburg acquired Mainz in 1514 in breach of the rules on age and plurality, borrowing from the Fugger bank to pay the confirmation fee; the indulgence proceeds were divided between St Peter's and the repayment. Johann Tetzel preached the campaign. ↩
The loan came from the house of Fugger of Augsburg under Jakob Fugger the Rich. Leo X's bull Sacrosancti salvatoris (1515) granted the indulgence for Albrecht's provinces, with the proceeds divided equally between the building of St Peter's and the repayment of Albrecht's debt. A Fugger factor accompanied the campaign, held a key to the chest and kept the accounts, remitting the bank's share directly. ↩
Johann Tetzel OP was the sub-commissary who preached the campaign in Magdeburg and Brandenburg. The couplet 'as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs' is attributed to him by his opponents and is referred to in Luther's theses 27 and 28. The Instructio summaria issued in Albrecht's name in 1517 sets out a graduated tariff by rank: at the top kings, queens and great princes; then abbots, counts and barons; then lesser nobles and officials; then burghers with their own income; then lesser tradesmen; with prayer and fasting substituted for those with nothing. Thesis 86 asks why the pope, whose wealth is greater than that of the richest Crassus, does not build St Peter's with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers. ↩
Frederick III of Saxony, called the Wise, assembled a relic collection displayed annually at the Castle Church in Wittenberg on All Saints' Day; the catalogue of 1509 lists 5,005 particles and the collection had reached about 19,013 by 1520, with an associated indulgence commonly reckoned at over 1.9 million years. Offerings supported the Castle Church foundation and the University of Wittenberg. Frederick barred Tetzel's campaign from Electoral Saxony. Luther sent the ninety-five theses to Albrecht of Mainz and to Hieronymus Schulz, bishop of Brandenburg, on 31 October 1517; the posting on the church door is reported first by Melanchthon in 1546, after Luther's death, and is disputed. ↩
Luther at the Diet of Worms, April 1521; the Edict of Worms, May 1521, placed him under imperial ban. Frederick the Wise arranged his seizure and concealment at the Wartburg, where Luther translated the New Testament, published in September 1522. Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, secularized the Order's Prussian lands in 1525 and became hereditary duke, having sought Luther's advice. The Peace of Augsburg, 25 September 1555, established cuius regio, eius religio, with a right of emigration for dissenting subjects. ↩
The Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia, printed March 1525 — among the first documents of its kind to be mass-produced by printing. ↩
The Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia were drawn up at Memmingen in late February or early March 1525, chiefly by Sebastian Lotzer, a journeyman furrier, with Christoph Schappeler; some twenty-five editions were printed within about two months. The third article argues against serfdom on the ground that Christ redeemed all alike, citing among others 1 Corinthians 7:23; the twelfth undertakes to withdraw any article shown to be contrary to scripture. English translations are in Michael Baylor, The Radical Reformation, and in Peter Blickle's studies of the war. ↩
Martin Luther, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, May 1525. Estimates of the dead run as high as 100,000 out of roughly 300,000 poorly armed peasants. ↩
Luther, Admonition to Peace (April 1525), blames the lords for provoking the rising; Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (May 1525) instructs rulers that whoever can should 'smite, slay and stab' the rebels, secretly or openly, as one would kill a mad dog, and that a prince who dies so doing is a blessed martyr. English text in Luther's Works, American edition, volume 46. ↩
The battle of Frankenhausen, 15 May 1525: a peasant force was destroyed by the troops of Philip of Hesse, George of Saxony and Henry of Brunswick, with about 6,000 peasant dead against negligible princely losses. Thomas Muntzer, taken afterwards, was tortured and beheaded at Muhlhausen on 27 May 1525. Total deaths across the German Peasants' War are usually given as up to 100,000 out of perhaps 300,000 participants; the figures are estimates. ↩
Act of Supremacy 1534; the Valor Ecclesiasticus survey 1535; the Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries 1536 and the surrender of the greater houses by 1540, some 800 houses in all; the Court of Augmentations administered the property, the bulk of which was sold within about a decade, largely to fund war with France and Scotland. The Chantries Acts of 1545 and 1547 dissolved chantries, guilds and their endowments, many of which supported schools and local charity. Subsequent vagrancy legislation: the Act of 1547 (branding and two years' servitude, repealed 1550) and the Act of 1572 (whipping and boring of the ear). The Poor Relief Acts of 1598 and 1601 established a compulsory parish poor rate. ↩
Alexander Savine's analysis of the Valor Ecclesiasticus (1909) estimated alms at roughly three percent of English monastic net income, a figure still commonly cited, though the Valor undercounts casual doles and hospitality. Historians disagree about the scale and quality of monastic charity; they do not generally disagree that the endowments were sold rather than redirected. On the later debate see Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1971), and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992). ↩
The St Bartholomew's Day massacre began in Paris in August 1572. The Thirty Years' War ran from 1618 to 1648; modern estimates of population loss in the German lands range from about 15 to 30 percent, and far higher in some regions. ↩
The St Bartholomew's Day massacre began before dawn on 24 August 1572, after the marriage of Marguerite de Valois to Henry of Navarre on 18 August and the failed attempt on Admiral Gaspard de Coligny on 22 August. Estimates are disputed: roughly 2,000-3,000 killed in Paris and several thousand more in provincial towns over the following weeks, with totals usually given between about 5,000 and 10,000. Gregory XIII had a Te Deum sung, struck a commemorative medal inscribed Ugonottorum strages 1572, and commissioned frescoes of the event by Giorgio Vasari for the Sala Regia in the Vatican. ↩
The Thirty Years' War, 1618-48, began with the defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618. Armies were maintained by 'contributions' levied on occupied districts, a system associated with Wallenstein; mortality was driven chiefly by typhus, plague, dysentery and famine rather than battle. Magdeburg was stormed and burned on 20 May 1631, with about 20,000 of some 25,000 inhabitants killed. By the Treaty of Barwalde, January 1631, France under Cardinal Richelieu agreed to subsidize Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden at one million livres a year; France entered the war openly against the Habsburgs in 1635. Estimates of population loss in the German lands range from about 15 to 30 percent overall, far higher in some regions. ↩
Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat at Zurich on 5 January 1527 by sentence of the city council, with Zwingli's support; he is generally identified as the first Anabaptist executed by Protestant authorities. The Anabaptist regime at Munster fell in June 1535; the bodies of Jan van Leiden and two others were displayed in iron cages on the tower of St Lambert's church, where the cages remain. Michael Servetus was burned at Champel outside Geneva on 27 October 1553; Calvin had pressed for his condemnation and asked for beheading instead of burning. Sebastian Castellio published De haereticis, an sint persequendi in 1554 under the name Martinus Bellius; the sentence 'to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man' comes from his Contra libellum Calvini. ↩
The Diggers occupied St George's Hill in April 1649 and were driven off within a year. Gerrard Winstanley's phrase is "a common treasury for all." ↩
The Diggers began cultivating St George's Hill, Walton-on-Thames, on 1 April 1649, two months after the execution of Charles I and after the failed harvest of 1648, when grain prices reached their century high. Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard were the leading figures; The True Levellers Standard Advanced (April 1649) contains the phrase 'a common treasury for all'. Thomas Fairfax visited the colony. The diggers suffered repeated destruction of crops and dwellings, assaults, and prosecutions at Kingston at which they were refused leave to plead in person. After moving to Cobham Heath the colony was destroyed in April 1650 under John Platt, rector of West Horsley and lord of the manor of Cobham, as Winstanley describes in An Humble Request. ↩