Martin Luther begins the Reformation, 1517

31^st October 1517 was the day on which the Protestant Reformation began, as this was when a monk named Martin Luther nailed his “95 theses” to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, which is between Berlin and Leipzig, Germany.

Luther took exception to the method used by Pope Leo X to raise money for the completion of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, namely the sale of indulgences to release the souls of the departed from Purgatory. The Pope encouraged agents throughout Europe to sell these pieces of paper to naïve and gullible people, in the belief that this would ensure that their loved ones would get to Heaven, and that they would also do so when their own time came.

Luther was particularly incensed by the hard-sell methods used by Johann Tetzel, a German Dominican friar, who had been given the job by the Archbishop of Mainz.

The 95 theses complained about many failings of the Catholic Church, which had been a corrupt organization for a very long time. Indeed, Geoffrey’s Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the late 14^th century, included side-swipes at a number of questionable practices that were current then and which had not been put right before Luther’s dramatic gesture in 1517.

Luther made sure that his complaints did not just stay on the church door at Wittenberg. Copies were sent to the Archbishop of Mainz and, thanks to the relatively recent invention of printing, they soon reached many parts of Europe. The hammer and nails used at Wittenberg threw off sparks that would light a powder keg under the whole rotten edifice of the medieval Catholic Church.

© John Welford

Huldrych Zwingli, an early Protestant martyr

The name Huldrych Zwingli may not be one of the better known from European history, and it is certainly not one that trips easily off the tongue, but he was an important pioneer of the Protestant Reformation and a contemporary of Martin Luther. 11^th October 1531 was the day on which he was killed in a battle between Protestants and Catholics.

Huldrych Zwingli was born in St Gall, Switzerland, on 1^st January 1484 and was thus two months younger than Martin Luther. He became a priest at the age of 20 and acted as chaplain to a brigade of mercenary soldiers. In this capacity he fought on the losing side at the Battle of Marignano in September 1515 when the Swiss had been hired to help defend Milan against an attack from France.

As a churchman, Zwingli was anxious to institute reforms in what he saw as a corrupt Church, his basic tenet being that Christ, and not the Pope, was the head of the Church. As a soldier, he adopted a militant attitude to the task of cleaning up the Church, his activities including destroying organs and removing “graven images” from churches and then breaking them up.

Zwingli went further than Luther in that he objected to the doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine of the Mass were the “real presence” of Christ), and in 1524 he demonstrated his rejection of priestly celibacy by getting married.

He gathered plenty of support for his views, and even incited revolts against such practices as religious fasting. He was particularly successful in the city and canton of Zurich.

In 1531 he set out with his band of soldiers to defend the Protestants of Zurich against the Catholics of five other cantons. At the monastery of Kappel, on the border between the cantons of Zurich and Zug, a fight broke out on 11^th October in which Zwingli was fatally injured. His last words were: “What does it matter? They can kill the body but they cannot kill the soul.”

© John Welford