He was briefly married to Queen Mary Tudor of England. He never trusted his generals; and, for the most part, he was ill-served by them. He abjectly failed in his mission to stamp out heresy in Western Europe. His incompetence rendered him, paradoxically, a good friend of Protestantism.
Pope Saint Pius V
Arguably the greatest pope in a turbulent and momentous century, Michele Ghislieri was the second of the outstanding Puritan popes. A former shepherd, he was a very clean-living Dominican who steadily worked his way through various offices – including that of inquisitor general. Here he incurred the wrath of Caraffa, who thought he was too soft. Nonetheless, he carried on Caraffa’s tradition of austerity and fierceness, but he mingled it with a leavening of compassion. He controversially excommunicated Queen Elizabeth of England.
He completed Caraffa’s work by finally turning Rome, for most of the sixteenth century second only to Paris as a centre of decadence, into a clean and even monastic city. The later masters of the high baroque, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, adorned Rome with gorgeous sensual art yet did not destroy the city’s new spirituality.
Pius V made the eternal city a fitting place of pilgrimage. He also turned the office of pope into what it surely should be, that of a priest, a pastor and a cleric rather than a worldly potentate (despite his part in gathering the vast navy that finally defeated the Turks at Lepanto).
He has been accused of political naivety, yet he had the foresight and the wisdom to put the main decisions of the long-standing Council of Trent into effect; and this was a political as much as a spiritual process. He published the all-important catechism which codified the long work of Trent. He relied overmuch on the Inquisition, and he was not averse to using cruelty and torture when he deemed it necessary. But he cleansed Rome, he cleansed the papacy, and overall he was a good man. Arguably the most significant Catholic figure of the sixteenth century after Loyola, he was much later (in 1712) canonised.
Girolamo Savonarola
A Dominican who was a preacher of raw power, Savonarola was a terrifying enemy of frivolity, immorality, corruption, showy wealth and the abuse of clerical office. Determined to cleanse and renew the mercenary Church, he was the most notable of the ‘outriders’, the various anticipators of the Reformation.
For a time, he held total sway over the republic of Florence, preaching in a way that put fear into some (including Michelangelo) and inspired others. He organised the celebrated ‘bonfires of the vanities’. All this was too much for the papacy; after a mockery of a trial, he was burned to death.
Suleiman the Magnificent
Ottoman sultan and warlord, his sultanate of forty-six years was crucial in that it diverted the forces that might well have otherwise crushed the Reformation. Suleiman led from the front. He was one of the most adept practitioners of the grisly art of war that the world has ever known, and he rampaged around vast tracts of Eastern Europe, posing a constant threat to the security of the West in general and the Holy Roman Empire in particular. For example, in a hard-fought battle in 1526, his cavalry utterly routed the massed armies of Hungary, leaving around 18,000 slaughtered in the field, including the king and many of his nobles.
Suleiman was even stronger in the Mediterranean, and his mastery of that sea allowed him to move with impunity through North Africa and much of the Middle East. He was indeed magnificent: he was a great legislator and a distinguished patron of the arts as well as a fearsome generalissimo. In Western Europe, popes, princes, emperors, queens and kings were all deeply afraid of him.
Five years after he died in 1566, the papacy at last managed to gather the military forces of Roman Catholic Christendom, and they defeated the Turks in the huge set-piece sea battle of Lepanto.
Suleiman’s role in the history of the Reformation may be peripheral, but it is highly significant nonetheless.
William Tyndale
A scholar, linguist and translator of unsurpassed genius, his mastery of the English language was consummate. The first person to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English, he did so in prose which is accessible, supple, beautiful, numinous and noble. His rhythms and cadences are with us to this day. Few literary scholars manage to make a major contribution to a social, political and religious revolution, but this is precisely what Tyndale did.
His The Obedience of a Christian Man is one of the most underestimated books in our language. His influence on the thinking, literature and religion of English-speaking people can hardly be overstated.
Born in Gloucestershire and educated at Oxford, he travelled widely on the continent in the 1520s, staying in Hamburg and Cologne, and in Luther’s Wittenberg. He was something of a loner, and valued his independence. He does not seem to have been particularly pleasant in his personal dealings. Betrayed by an Englishman called Phillips when he was living covertly in Antwerp, he was arrested by the authorities, imprisoned for heresy, and then strangled and burnt to death.
Huldrych Zwingli
A leading Swiss reformer, who dominated the important city of Zurich in the 1520s, Zwingli was highly sexed, charismatic and a theatrically powerful preacher. His short but influential career as a reformer indicated the essentially fissile nature of Protestantism; he was much alarmed by the growth of radical Anabaptism in Zurich, and he fell out with Luther in a nasty, extended spat over what happened at communion. The way the two men abused each other in a series of polemical tracts ended whatever brief hopes there had been that Protestantism might be a united movement.
Zwingli was killed in combat, wielding his battleaxe, as he fought the army of the Catholic cantons of Switzerland.
Introduction
THIS is an intensely dramatic story. It is the story of extraordinary courage, of martyrs, of burnings and persecution, of danger and escape, of degradation and wickedness, of superhuman heroism, of felicity and nobility, of betrayal and treachery, of the destruction of much that was precious and beautiful, of constant, unremitting and often incomprehensible change, of fervent spiritual yearning, of warfare and strife, of social renewal and visionary democratic innovation. It is in part the story of the beginning of the modern world. And that itself, paradoxically, is just the beginning of it. Most of all, this is about the Christian quest for God.
Many people still regard the European Reformation as an unmitigated disaster which led to division and secularisation. Others regard it as the most positive movement in world history, a movement that led to the opening of the minds of ordinary people and set them free from the forces of medieval darkness. Still more find in it the seeds of modern capitalism, or modern decadence, or both. The Reformation divided, and it still divides.
There is peace and piety to be found in this story, but perhaps not enough of either. One thing is clear: our story is supremely one of turbulence and uproar. Its great begetter, a beer-swilling, boorish German peasant who, in his own words, was just ‘an uncivilised fellow from the backwoods’, was also, despite himself, a brilliant revolutionary – possibly the most effective revolutionary in human history. This man, Martin Luther, felt himself constantly ‘impelled by God into the midst of uproar’. This is the story of the Great Uproar.
Our story begins not with Martin Luther but with a man winning the crown of England in battle. His name was Henry Tudor. He was determined to have his royal legitimacy endorsed by the highest authority available: the pope, his ‘Vicar on Earth’. When Pope Innocent VIII duly confirmed Henry Tudor as Henry VII, the rightful king of England, he was ensuring among other things that the new monarch would have the loyalty of the English clergy, of whom there were many (far too many). This was important for Henry because the senior clergy controlled much of the land of England and exercised considerable political power.
Henry VII proved to be a most pious king, though his piety was at times stagey and used for secular purposes. He went on many pilgrimages, but his principal work of devotion was the building of an extravagant and gorgeous monument to himself,