If we are to understand the importance of 1517 and Playmobil sales, we need to understand how it can be fitted into a story of what came before and what came after. First of all, the event itself, courtesy of Joseph Fiennes and Hollywood.

Martin Luther and the Reformation

In brief, Martin Luther (1483-1546), was the first reformer to lead a large number of people to openly and successfully, break with the church in Rome. As we have seen, during the Middle Ages the powerful authority of the church had extended over all areas of political, economic, social and cultural life. The Reformation did much to destroy this control. The Reformation was a revolt against the authority of the Catholic Church in Rome. The Reformation was also a rebellion against the corruption and abuses in the church and the interference of the leader of the Church - the Pope - in non religious affairs. Those who rebelled, protested against the Pope and demanded a reform of the church were called ‘Protestants’.

Luther was a native German who became a monk at the age of twenty-two and 1510 he was sent to Rome, an event that marked a turning point in his life. In 1512 he was appointed as professor of theology in the University of Wittenberg. He questioned the sale of indulgences in 1517 by agents of Pope Leo X, who were collecting money for the construction of St. Peter’s Church at Rome.
 

Building the narrative, long and short-term causes.

Understanding causes is central to what history is about. Historians like to link different events together that share something in common. For example, as we saw in Unit 1, historians use categories like political, economic, social and cultural (PESC) to explain clearly why things happen. Another way of organizing causes (and consequences) is to divide them into long-term and short-term. Long-term causes take place a long-time before the event and are not an obvious, direct cause of the event. They often provide the context in which the event is more likely to happen. Short-term causes happen immediately before the event and are obviously and directly linked to the event.
 

First a short detour into philosophy (again). Unit 2 has all been about the long-term, contextual causes of the Reformation. However, the history covered by these lessons, for example the Black Death, is significant not simply because of what it helped cause later. This is to be overly teleological. These events are important in their own right. But, if we are to fully understand what came later, we can only do so in the light of what came before. These are long-term causes of the Reformation then, because these events happened a long-time before the Reformation and are not obviously connected to it.
 

In Lesson 2, we leant how Christendom was undermined by forces outside of Europe, notably Islam. The fall of Toledo, the Crusades, the trade routes across the Mongol empire and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, all saw superior Arabic and pre-Christian (e.g. Greek) ideas infiltrate Europe. These ideas not only challenged the hegemony (domination) of Christian teaching, they also stimulated the trade and generated the wealth that the towns and cities of Lesson 1 were based on.

In Lesson 3,  we saw how the Black Death (1347-51) in  particular had had a negative impact on the influence of the church, especially in Western Europe. A very high percentage of priests were killed and the credibility of the church was damaged by its inability to explain the disease. As the biggest landowner in Europe the church also suffered from the damage done to the feudal system by peasants rebelling against their masters.

In Lesson 4, we explored the beginning of the great Age of Discovery. The discovery of the sea route to India in 1498 and the trans-Atlantic Voyages of Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1502, were driven by social and economic forces and had enormous long-term consequences. The wealth unleashed, kick-started the new mercantile capitalist economies of the growing towns that further eroded feudal power. And of course, without it, we would never have had the Pizza!

In Lesson 5, we studied the Renaissance and how the new philosophical outlook of Humanism encouraged some to think outside of the box of scholasticism. We saw how new paradigms in the sciences (e.g. heliocentricism) and new techniques in the arts, encouraged people to see the world anew. The study of Greek after the fall of Constantinople and the development of the printing press (both in the 1450s) transformed both the content and means of communication. The importance of which is explained in this film.

Earlier opposition to the Church

Martin Luther in 1517, was not the first to criticize the Catholic Church. During the 14th and 15th centuries, strong criticism was made about the practices of clergymen. The clergy’s wealth made it appear that they were worshippers of money rather than of God. Church rituals and practices became a source of profits. There was an unlimited sale of relics. Several scholars raised their voices in opposition to certain Catholic teachings and practices. Among them was John Wycliffe (1320-1384), an English priest and professor at the University of Oxford who declared that the pope was not Christ’s representative on earth. He also felt that individual Christians should only be guided by what they read in the Bible. His followers were known as the Lollards. The English Kings, tried to stop the spread of the Lollard movement through fines, imprisonment and burning.

After Wycliffe’s death, his writings were spread in Bohemia by John Huss, a priest and professor in the University of Prague. The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund invited John Huss to attend a general church council at Constance where he was burned at the stake in 1415. This led to a popular protest in what is today’s Czech Republic. The Hussite Wars  lasted for many years.

A second problem arose when the Catholic world became divided over the legitimacy of the real pope. This was the Great Schism. The Pope’s power had already begun to decline with the rise of powerful Kings. For example, the French King Philip IV (1285-1314) succeeded in establishing the right to tax church property, despite opposition by the pope. He also forced the pope to live in Avignon in France, instead of Rome, after the pope’s interference in his political affairs. This ‘Babylonian Captivity’ lasted for 70 years and greatly damaged the pope’s prestige and power. The election of two popes, one by the Italian church and another by the French church, damaged the Church still further. In 1409 a council in Pisa was established to resolve the situation, but in the absence of the Roman and French delegations, ended up electing a third pope. The matter was settled in 1417 when a new pope was elected and accepted by all. But the damage to the credibility of the church had already been done.

A final powerful influence on the decline of the church was to be found in the increasingly irreligious behaviour of the popes themselves, which was leading to wide-spread criticism. In 1512  Hieronymus Bosch painted the Haywain. In the central panel Bosch shows humanity dragged along by sin, following behind a haywain. Leading the crowds to hell is the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. This echoed the sentiments of the work of Dürer we saw last week.

The Short-term causes of the Reformation

The actions of the popes at the beginning of the 16th century did much to bring the Catholic church into disrepute. The popes were involved in financial corruption and political assassination, the word 'nepotism' comes from the papal practice of this time of giving their nephews well paid and influential roles in the church. The most notorious pope was Alexander VI (1492-1503), who ended up wearing a mask to cover-up his disfigurement by syphilis and died, according to some theories,  when an attempt to poison a cardinal went wrong.

But it was the actions of Pope Leo X that would precipitate the Reformation. From the powerful Medici family, nepotism saw him become an Abbot at the age of eight and head of the great abbey of Monte Cassino aged eleven. As pope, he enjoyed banquets and processions, he had a pet elephant and spent astronomical amounts on the arts. But his most ambitious plan was to rebuild St Peter's basilica in Rome. The money for this project was to come from the sale of indulgences. As we have seen, an indulgence was like a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, extra credit the church could issue, acquired from all the good deeds of Jesus and the Saints.  In 1476, Pope Sixtus IV had declared that it was possible to buy an indulgence for someone already in purgatory. This proved to be a highly marketable idea, especially in the hands of a master indulgence salesman like Johannes Tetzel and his slogan 'When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs'.