The city-states of Renaissance Italy initiated the practice of sending ambassadors abroad. These diplomats wrote required statements to their governments on relevant affairs in the lands to which they were appointed. Quirini (fl. 1507), the Venetian ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493-1519), wrote one such report which provides a valuable contemporary summary of the complex and fragmented structure of Germany society on the eve of the Reformation. This report illustrates the political and social tensions in Germany which helped shape the course of Luther's Reformation.

The importation of moveable type, which was invented in China, and the subsequent development of the book industry was a technological precondition for the upheavals of the Reformation. Johann Gutenberg established the first European printing press in Mainz, Germany during the 1450s. The printing press made it possible to transmit ideas, whether in books, pamphlets, or pictures, more rapidly and on a vaster scale than had been possible only a few decades before. From the publication of Gutenberg's famous Bible in 1456, religious texts dominated the book market well into the 1600s.

Martin Luther (1483-1545) was an Augustinian monk who taught theology at the University of Wittenberg when he posted Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church on October 31, 1517. His original aim was simply to promote and participate in a theological disputation over indulgences at the university. His argument received much more attention than he expected; within a matter of years, Luther was at the center of a storm of controversy which did not ebb even upon his death in 1545. For, as Luther and his followers pondered the theological salvoes he launched with Ninety-Five Theses, it became increasingly difficult for them to harmonize the authority of the Bible with that of the Roman Catholic Church.

Charles V (r. 1519-1556), recently crowned emperor, convened an assembly in the city of Worms to respond to the crisis developing in Germany following Luther's revolt against the authority of the Roman Church. This document reveals the young emperor's religiously and politically motivated rejection of Luther and his followers. Proclaimed in May 1521, the Edict of the Diet of Worms failed to produce the obedience and conformity for which Charles hoped. Instead, the various principalities of the Empire continued to fragment both politically and religiously.

This woodcut illustrates the use of visual propaganda by the early Protestants. It is one of many woodcuts in a 1521 Protestant devotional booklet entitled Passional Christi und Antichristi. This work sharply contrasted scenes from the life of Christ with the contemporary activities of the Pope. Much of the implied theological substance of these drawings was inspired by Luther's writings of 1520, but the theological commentary on the pictures in the book itself was supplied by Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther's closest follower.

The life of the peasantry during the Reformation was grueling. The Church preached that labor was the just punishment of God for original sin. Until the Reformation, it was generally taken for granted that the social order as it existed in the countryside--lords, clergymen, and peasants--had likewise been ordained by God. After 1517, radical religious reformers began to preach social and economic equality in Germany. These ideas, in addition to the peasants’ material grievances, led to the outbreak of the Peasants’ War in 1524. The socially conservative Luther disappointed the peasants by siding with the victorious nobility.

The Twelve Articles were compiled early in 1525 in the imperial city of Memmingen by Sebastian Lotzer, a tanner, and Christoph Schappeler, the evangelical pastor of St. Martin's church in Memmingen. Lotzer and Schappeler drew upon and summarized various grievance lists which had circulated among Upper Swabian peasants. Composed during the German Peasants' War of 1524-1526, this document illuminates both social conditions in early sixteenth-century Germany and the combustible mixture which could be made of religion and politics during the Reformation. Note how the peasants use the gospel to justify their social and economic demands.

The "Marburg Colloquy" was a gathering of the major figures of the early Reformation. The most important disputants were Luther and Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) of Switzerland. It was primarily an effort to achieve theological unity over the particularly divisive issue of the nature of the Lord's Supper, although, had that been achieved, these debates might also have led to a political union between the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany. However, the result of the gathering was not unity, but a rift between the Lutheran and Reformed branches of Protestantism which would only grow wider.

Some Protestants believed that Luther and the other major reformers had not gone nearly far enough. They felt that a true Christian should literally follow the word of Christ and must separate himself from the rest of society. Since they advocated adult baptism, in which the participant, unlike an infant, could rationally accede to it, they were derogatorily called Anabaptists, or re-baptizers. Descendants of the early Anabaptists include the Mennonites, the Moravian Brethren and, in the seventeenth century, the Quakers. The following document records the doctrinal agreement which a group of Anabaptists came to during a 1527 meeting in the Swiss village of Schleitheim.

In November of 1534 the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, officially acknowledging King Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) as the supreme head of the Church of England, and repudiating the Papacy as an alien political entity. Ironically, Henry had earlier been regarded by Rome as a "defender of the faith" due to his staunch opposition to Lutheranism. But Henry had been excommunicated by the Pope in 1533 for annulling his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when she failed to produce a male heir. The Protestant Anglican Church eventually resulted from this dispute and Henry went on to marry five more times.

This woodcut from John Foxe's book Actes and Monuments (1569) illustrates Henry VIII's triumph over Pope Clement VII. The image suggests both the religious and political aspects of England's repudiation of Roman Catholicism. Actes and Monuments was a celebration of the trials, tribulations and triumphs of Protestantism in England. Under Henry's daughter Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), the book was placed alongside the vernacular Bible in every English pulpit.

John Calvin (1509-1564) published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Basel, Switzerland, in 1536. In the decades to follow, Calvin revised and expanded the book on numerous occasions, and it was translated into several European languages. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Institutes served the international community of Reformed Protestants as their first authoritative theological reference book. Calvin dedicated the first edition of the book to Francis I (r. 1515-1547), the king of France, in part to defend French Protestants against charges of heresy and sedition. The dedication also serves as a clear summary of his doctrinal views.

Charles V deputized his brother Ferdinand to preside over the peace negotiations at Augsburg between Catholics and Lutherans in 1555. The Peace of Augsburg ended decades of inconclusive warfare and was an admission of the Emperor's failure to repress the new religion. Lutheranism was accepted as a legal form of Christianity in those regions of the Empire in which it was already established and entrenched. Other branches of Protestantism, however, remained proscribed in Germany.

The Turkish capture of Constantinople, combined with the break up of the Mongol Golden Horde, prompted Muscovy's leaders to contemplate the fortuitous rise of Moscow as a major power in northeastern Europe. The Muscovite monk Filofei submitted an explanation for these events to Vasilii III (r. 1505-1533) between 1515 and 1521. This theory posited that ancient Rome had collapsed because of the heresies of its people, while Constantinople, the second Rome, had fallen because its residents were not true Christians. In Filofei's account, Moscow now had the burden of carrying on the true Christian faith, making it "the Third Rome." At the time of the Reformation that swept Europe, the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome gained added importance in Muscovy, and helped to form the basis of Moscow's political legitimacy.

The American scholar Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909) argues that the causes of the Reformation were primarily political and social in nature. For Lea, the religious movements were essentially vehicles for deeper, more personal concerns of the German laity. In his anaysis, moreover, Lea focuses on the role of humanism in northern Europe as a force responsible for change and amenable to the promises of the Protestant Reformation, contrasting that with Italian humanism in the South.

Wondering how the Reformation became so successful, historian Roland Bainton acknowledges the secular factors that Lea and other scholars have emphasized, but asserts that the origins, outcomes, and significance of the Reformation cannot be grasped if the religious quality of the movement is ignored. He takes as his starting point the extremely pious Martin Luther, and from there challenges the primacy of politics or religion in the minds of German princes or peasants. In the end, he challenges the next generation of scholars to put these forces into better balance both in their writing and in their teaching.