A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (24 page)

Luther was a brilliant polemicist, pouring out tract after tract stating his case, as well as a translation of the Bible which decisively influenced the development of the German language. Yet this, in itself, does not explain the impact of his actions. There was a long tradition of opposition to the Roman Catholic church based on ideas very similar to Luther’s. There had been an underground ‘Waldensian’ church with groups in major European cities for 200 years. The Hussites had fought a century before behind very similar ideas in Bohemia, and there were still many ‘Lollard’ followers of the late 14th century reformer Wycliffe in England. But these movements had never succeeded in tearing apart the church and the society within which it existed. Luther did exactly this, as did other reformers who differed with him on points of doctrine—Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva.

To understand why this happened it is necessary to look at the wider economic and social changes which had occurred since the crisis of the 14th century—changes which laid the ground for the new religions, just as they laid the ground for the new monarchies, the conquests in the new world and the new learning of the Renaissance. The feudal economy and feudal society were giving birth to something new, and Protestantism was one of its birth cries.

The economy in transition

West European society had been experiencing slow but cumulative changes over hundreds of years, changes which were often barely perceptible to those living through them. First, there was the slow, intermittent, but continual advance in the techniques of production as artisans, shipbuilders and military engineers took up innovations arriving from elsewhere in Eurasia and North Africa and added their own improvements. So by the beginning of the 16th century there were scores of devices which were unknown in the 12th century and often even in the 14th—mechanical clocks in every important town, windmills as well as water mills, blast furnaces capable of producing cast iron, new ways of building and rigging ships and new devices for establishing their positions, the cannon and the musket for waging war, the printing press which provided for the mass copying of texts only previously available as highly treasured manuscripts in select libraries.

These technical innovations were the absolute precondition for all of the wider changes. Columbus may have been able to find a way to the Americas without the astrolabe from the Arab lands and the compass from China—it is more than possible that others had done so before him—but he would not have been able to chart the regular sea route that made return visits and the Spanish conquests possible. The monarchs’ armies would have been able to win one off battles without their improved crossbows and firearms, but they would not have been able to defeat the armoured cavalry of knights, flatten the castles of the lords or defeat peasant pikemen. Renaissance thinkers in northern Italy would have been able to revive some interest in Greek and Roman writings without the printing press, but the influence of these writings could not have spread across most of Europe without their reproduction in thousands of copies. In the same way, Luther’s challenge to the papacy would not have been able to find such a huge audience. In fact, the printing press ensured the ground was already prepared for his ideas. In England, for instance, the printing houses ensured ‘a delayed but maximum force’ for the anti-clerical arguments found in Wycliffe, in Langland’s
Piers Ploughman
and, to a lesser extent in Chaucer, so that ‘the 14th century invaded the 16th’.
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But the techniques alone could accomplish nothing. They had to be put to use, sometimes at considerable cost. Weapons had to be manufactured, minerals mined, printing presses financed, ships built, armies provisioned. Such things could only be done on the required scale because the social as well as the technical organisation of production had undergone massive changes.

In the early feudal period, production had been for immediate use—for keeping the peasant family alive and for enabling the lord to live in luxury. What mattered were what Adam Smith and Karl Marx later called ‘use values’—the necessities of life for the peasant family and luxuries to satisfy the extravagant tastes of the feudal lord. The pressure to expand production, either by the peasant working harder or by the use of new techniques, could only come from the peasant’s desire to live a little better or the lord’s desire to consume even more extravagantly. As Marx also put it, the level of exploitation of the peasants was limited by ‘the size of the stomach of the feudal lord’. In such a society exchange and money played a marginal role. If someone wanted to build up their wealth, they would grab land rather than hoard gold.

By the beginning of the 15th century things were already very different. The production of things to sell—to exchange for gold or silver which in turn could be exchanged for other things—was increasingly prevalent. What Smith and Marx called ‘exchange value’ became increasingly important. The peasant family might still produce most of its own food and clothing, but it required money to pay rent, to buy farming tools and to provide for itself if the harvest failed. The lords and monarchs required money on a massive scale. Long distance trade meant exotic luxuries could be obtained from the other end of the world, at a price. And if someone could obtain enough money, he (or sometimes she) could acquire an army capable of conquering others (armies were increasingly made up of mercenaries), or obtain the ships and hire the sailors necessary for voyages of discovery, trade or piracy. Overall, money began to become what it is today.

Over time, this would transform the world of work entirely, so that it ceased to be about meeting human needs and became simply a means by which those with money could make more money. This process was far from complete at the beginning of the 16th century. Most artisans would still expect to receive a customary price for any job and have the freedom to celebrate on feast days and saints days, and most peasants still saw their work as tied to the routine of the seasons not the treadmill of the commodity markets. But it was, nevertheless, under way and had been for a couple of centuries. The slow spread of the market networks through town and country had encroached on the lives of growing numbers of people. Close to major towns, ports or navigable rivers, whole areas of the countryside were being turned over to the production of ‘industrial crops’—flax for linen, grapes for wine making, olives for oil, woad or saffron for dyeing—or to herding to meet a growing demand for meat in the towns and among the upper classes. Merchants were increasingly using the ‘putting out’ system to pressurise handicraft workers to accept lower payments based on supply and demand rather than the old customary prices—and encouraging the growth of new, rurally based industry when, as was often the case, the urban artisans refused to sacrifice their way of life to the god of merchant profiteering. In areas like the uplands of south Germany, Bohemia and Transylvania great financiers like the Fugger family—who financed the wars of the Spanish and Holy Roman monarchs—were establishing mines worked by waged labour.

It was the role already played by production for the market which made the outcome of the crisis of the 14th century very different to that of the crises which had beset the Roman Empire in the 5th century and China in the 3rd and 13th centuries. On those occasions, famine, civil war and foreign invasion had produced a fragmentation into great estates, largely cut off economically from each other and from the wider society. The crisis of the 14th century, by contrast, was followed by an extension of market relations throughout Europe. Even where feudal serfdom revived, it was serfdom designed to produce crops which the lord could sell at a handsome profit to great traders.

The crisis did not destroy the towns. Even though vast numbers of villages were deserted in the aftermath of the famines and plagues, most towns remained intact. And by the middle of the 15th century they were in the forefront of a new economic expansion which was encouraging the use of the new technologies, like those of printing and shipping. The towns did not all gain from this new period. The very spread of the market, of production for exchange instead of for immediate use, meant the fortunes of individual towns were accident prone. Some that had done very well in the previous period now suffered a reverse from the impact, through the market, of unforeseeable changes in production or of political events in distant lands. Others which had lagged behind now leapt ahead. Barcelona, Florence and the great Hanseatic trading cities of northern Europe and the Baltic all declined to various degrees in the 16th century, while other cities in the northern Low Country (the present day Netherlands), southern Spain, south east Germany and England began to flourish.

The market had another effect. It transformed the conditions under which millions lived. After the middle of the 15th century prices began to rise and the living standards of the mass of people to fall. Real wages, which had often doubled in the century after the Black Death, fell by between half and two-thirds from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 16th,
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while the peasantry were subject to increased pressures to pay various sorts of dues to the lords.

There was frenzied money making among the rich of the country and town alike. The gold lust of Columbus, Cortés and Pizarro was one expression of this. Another was the church’s trade in indulgences which led to Luther’s first outburst. So too was the turn to renewed serfdom in eastern Europe and to the first forms of capitalist farming in parts of western Europe. Money was becoming the measure of everything. Yet the official values of society were still those embodied in the hierarchy of the old feudalism.

The church had been absolutely central to the medieval values. Its ceremonies embodied the behaviour expected of the different classes—often represented visually in its carvings and stained glass windows. Yet the church itself was afflicted by the gold lust. Members of great merchant families like the Medicis or Borgias became popes in order to increase their own wealth, and expected to pass it on to illegitimate sons. Teenage boys were appointed to lucrative bishoprics. Clergymen took the incomes from several churches and expected to appear at none of them. Nobles relied on the tithes paid to the church for as much as half their income. Priests and monks squeezed impoverished peasants by lending money at high interest rates, even though usury was meant to be a sin.

Historians have wasted enormous amounts of time arguing over the exact interrelation between capitalism and Protestantism. A whole school influenced by the sociologist (and German nationalist) Max Weber has argued that Protestant values produced capitalism, without explaining where the alleged Protestant ‘spirit’ came from.
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Other schools have argued that there is no connection at all, since many early Protestants were not capitalists and the most entrenched Protestant regions in Germany included those of the ‘second serfdom’.
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Yet the connection between the two is very easy to see. The impact of technical change and new market relations between people within feudalism led to a ‘mixed society’—‘market feudalism’—in which there was an intertwining but also a clash between capitalist and feudal ways of acting and thinking.

The superimposition of the structures of the market on the structures of feudalism led to the mass of people suffering from the defects of both. The ups and downs of the market repeatedly imperilled many people’s livelihoods; the feudal methods of agriculture still spreading across vast areas of eastern and southern Europe could not produce the yields necessary to feed the peasants as well as provide the luxuries of the lords and the armies of the monarchs.
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An expanding superstructure of ruling class consumption was destabilising a base of peasant production—and as the 16th century progressed, society was increasingly driven to a new period of crisis in which it was torn between going forward and going backward.

Every class in society felt confused as a result, and every class looked to its old religious beliefs for reassurance, only to find the church itself beset by the confusion. People could only come to terms with this situation if they found ways to recast the ideas they had inherited from the old feudalism. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, John Knox and the rest—and even Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuits and spearheaded the Catholic Counter-Reformation—provided them with such ways.

The German Reformation

Martin Luther and Jean Calvin had no intention of starting revolutionary movements, or even movements for social reform. They were prepared to make a radical challenge to the established religious order. But, for them, the arguments were
theological
—about how the Catholic church had distorted and corrupted the religious teaching of Jesus and the Apostles as expounded in the Bible. What mattered, they insisted, was the ‘faith’ of the individual, not the mediation of priests or ‘good works’—especially those involving payments to the church. The panoply of Catholic saints, worshipped through statues and shrines, was nothing short of an idolatrous adulteration of the biblical message, they insisted. Calvin went even further and held that the belief that worshippers were somehow consuming the flesh of Jesus during the rite of Holy Communion was blasphemous—a matter which prevented him conciliating with the followers of Luther, let alone with the church of Rome. It was over such questions that the early Protestants were to take great personal risks and urge their followers to stand firm—even though the punishment for heresy, enacted in public in cities across Europe, was to be burnt alive.

Yet both Luther and Calvin were conservative on social issues. In 1521 when the imperial authorities were demanding his head, Luther insisted that people had to obey these authorities on non-religious issues: