Emperor Charles V and the Dawning of “Confessionalization”

Men like Erasmus seem to have sensed that to champion religious peace was to struggle against the flow of events. His particular brand of pessimism focused on the emperor Charles V, the only Catholic prince who had the stature to promote a religious settlement on his own initiative, with or without papal approval.^[39] For a variety of reasons Erasmus was convinced that the emperor would never accept any solution short of the complete submission and/or annihilation of the Protestant party. As a Netherlander under Habsburg rule, Erasmus cherished the strong but false belief that an alien dynasty was milking the Low Countries for the needs of its other lands.^[40] Netherlandish too, in a more partisan sense, was his belief that responsibility for the continuing wars with France could be laid at Charles’s door.^[41] This enemy of “mendicant tyrants” also feared the emperor’s piety, for he took Charles’s devotion to “ceremonies” as implying a dependence on the friars.^[42] When Charles had a Franciscan confessor, Jean Glapion (d. 1522), Erasmus “dared not trust” the man, despite Glapion’s professions of support for him, “so important did the sacred habit seem.” Years later Erasmus admitted he had been mistaken.^[43] Such suspicions were to some degree mutual—courtiers grumbled that Erasmus did not come from Basel to pay his respects while Charles was in Germany, just as Erasmus complained that his “spies” in Brussels could not fathom what the emperor’s political aims were.^[44]

Worst of all, Erasmus believed that Charles V had come under the baneful influence of Pope Clement VII. Erasmus was dubious of the role that popes played in high politics, as is evident from his comment to Krzysztof Szydlowiecki, the chancellor of Poland, about Pope Clement’s failure to end the strife between Christendom’s greatest monarchs, Charles V and Francis I of France: “In fact, bad popes like nothing less than peace among the greatest princes, whose dissension makes them not just popes but kings of kings. I wonder that princes have not learned this after so many centuries.” As for Pope Clement himself: “It would be better if the pope placed his trust in the strength [praesidiis] of Christ, rather than in the crowd of cardinals, the armed might of princes, and the wickedness of the monks whose manner of living was the seedbed for all these troubles.” ^[45] Like many humanists in Germany, Erasmus saw the ritual by which the emperor kissed the pope’s foot as an odious symbol of a papal will to power, as at Charles’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor at Bologna in 1530.^[46] Soon thereafter, Erasmus formed a bad impression of the Medici pope from the subjugation of Florence to Medici rule by Spanish troops which took place in April 1530 as part of an overall reconciliation between the pope and the emperor.^[47] Thus in letters of this period Erasmus reiterated that even though “the world has never had a Caesar more powerful than this one, because of his piety and sense of religious duty to the Roman See, he will do whatever the bishop of Rome tells him.” ^[48]

For all of these reasons Erasmus greatly feared the designs of this now mature ruler for whom as an adolescent he had written his Institutio Principis Christiani. What the Christian world needed was “ambiguous articles” to forestall a war between Protestants and Catholics, but, as Erasmus said of Charles’s treaty with France in 1526, “no treaty will be concluded among the princes except on condition that Luther’s faction is stamped out, and the emperor will not feel he is really emperor unless he brings that about.” Severitas would not work, as he said to anyone who might listen, yet “Charles and his brother Ferdinand seem to be looking to severitas as their last best hope.” Knowing that Charles planned to go to Germany after settling affairs in Italy following his coronation, Erasmus feared

lest the emperor’s arrival will touch off bloody uprisings in Germany, for many cities are prepared for the worst. Great is Caesar’s power, I know, but the greatest part of the people is everywhere devoted to the new sects, and nearly all the peasants too, for they have not forgotten their defeat [in the Peasants Revolt of 1525].^[49]

Events in Florence intensified his anxiety: “I fear the devout obedience [to the pope] of this good prince will do great harm to Germany, as it has done to the Florentines.” That summer, while the diet was convened at Augsburg, Erasmus suspected Charles of making false promises to the Protestant estates: “He has said he will present the secular and ecclesiastical princes of the empire with a plan for remedying abuses in the church; but meanwhile, cities are told they must restore the property that have taken from priests and bishops.” Reports from friends in Augsburg led him to fear what might “befall that city of yours,” with its Protestant majority, for “the wrath of Caesar is keen, and King Ferdinand is high-spirited in no small degree.” ^[50]

Erasmus thus saw the emperor presenting himself as a defender of orthodoxy in order to increase his power, a design he attributed also to Charles’s Catholic allies, the dukes of Bavaria.^[51] The hypersuspicious Erasmus, expressing fears and anxieties that seem to have been widely shared among well-informed contemporaries, we have already met in these pages. Similarly, there has also been occasion to describe him as a thoughtful and consistent advocate of what historian of political thought Anthony Black has called “civil society.” ^[52] For Erasmus the proper Christian order was one that we might call protoliberal, characterized by the rule of law, pluriformity, and respect for the rights of all the various ordines that made up a Christian body politic, including, possibly, peaceable Christian religious minorities. But the middle decades of the sixteenth century were increasingly inspired by new visions of a uniform Christian social order. “Civil society” in Black’s sense of the term was losing out to what historians now call “confessionalization,” a process in which state power was enhanced as both Protestant and Catholic princes threw their full authority behind efforts to mold disparate populations into a cohesive community guided by a single standard of morals and belief.^[53] Erasmus seems to have had little sympathy for the principle of religious solidarity, whether on the part of Catholics who put aside their own criticisms in order to rally to the defense of an embattled church (like his friend Thomas More) or on the part of Protestants who demanded that the whole city conform to the true evangelical religion (like his friends in Basel). But he knew very well that such visions of the world were gaining ground. The future did indeed belong to those who on both sides of the divide called upon coreligionists to join together and gird themselves for a climactic struggle; it belonged also to the princes who built their own strength on a renewed alliance between throne and altar. From such a world an Erasmus could only withdraw, as he more and more did, and in the letters of his later years he often repeated that Christians could hope for an improvement in the affairs of the world only if God himself intervened, “as happens in Greek tragedies, when a deus ex machina suddenly shows himself.” ^[54] In a Christian body politic dominated by increasingly violent religious polemics and increasingly powerful princes, Erasmus could only wonder what the real impact of his own words had been, and this too he pondered in his waning years.