Chapo Trap House - Hell on Earth - Episode 1: GOD

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

A man, a hammer, a nail, a door, history. Martin Luther sets off the protestant reformation and lays the groundwork for a century of violence in Europe. This first episode of Hell on Earth: The Thirty Years War and the Violent Birth Capitalism is available for free. Subsequent episodes will be released exclusively for Chapo Trap House subscribers on Patreon at patreon.com/chapotraphouse. Interactive atlas, bibliography and credits for the series can be found at: hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com

Europe in the West did not come easily into capitalism. It was dragged into it, bleeding and screaming. I'd like to dedicate this series to Mr. Bob Taransky, my high school Euro history teacher, who I first heard that phrase from as he began our section on the Thirty Years' War. This is the story we want to tell with this series, specifically the story of the Thirty Years' War and the apocalyptic wave of destruction it brought across Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. But more broadly, it's the story of the gleaming terminator skeleton of capitalism, an estate capable of imposing capitalism, being ripped violently out of the fetid, decomposing body of feudalism during the long 17th century.

This is the story of princes and armies, of cool intrigue and royal courts and hot death on the battlefield, of people fighting for a world to come that would redeem the suffering of their lives. But it's also a remarkably familiar set of interlocking and escalating structural crises, climate change, financial collapse, pandemic, and a social fabric torn apart by rapid advances in communication technology. These times may seem remote, but this is also the story of the birth of the modern human subject out of the wreckage of the previous age. To welcome a new era, the past had to be destroyed through blade, through plague, through fire

and brimstone and damnation. I'm Chris Wade. I'm Matt Christmas. Welcome to Hell on Earth. On October 31, 1570, All Saints Day Eve, an obscure monk from the backwater German town of Wittenberg, sent a letter containing 95 doctrinal quibbles to the Archbishop of Mainz, and later most likely posted these 95 theses publicly on the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg. Nobody could have possibly imagined at that moment, but that simple post would be the beginning of one of the most seismic shifts in thought, society, and culture in

world history. Though our series focuses on the events that occur a century later, we have to start here with the Protestant Reformation, the protest movement within the Catholic Church that would grow into a full on religious schism and eventually lead to the collapse of the idea of Christendom, which had united Western Europe for 1000 years. So Matt, why do we start the story of the crisis of the 17th century in 1517? The crisis of the 17th century was brought about by an array of structural causes, from the struggle for the various classes of a dying feudal order to control the levers

of newly empowered dynastic states, to the little ice age that deprived the system of the agricultural inputs it depended on. The people of the early modern period did not experience these heightening contradictions directly, but rather through the intervening institutions that substantiated their social and political lives. Of those institutions, none was more crucial in providing legibility to the quotidian reality of European life than the Church. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church embodied the spiritual justification for the rule of the congealing military noble class that had inherited the Roman state's

defunct coercive power. The contradictions of a revolutionary creed based on universal love justifying the violent rule of jumped up bandit chiefs was never far from the surface, but throughout the medieval period, the Church maintained its legitimacy by, among other things, monopolizing the ritual mysteries of Christianity. That monopoly was challenged in the aftermath of the Black Plague by the emergence of literate urban communities who found themselves unable to sustain their commitment to Church ritual, absent the social rhythms of rural life that had dominated the previous centuries.

By the time the crop failures at hyperinflation and military conflicts of the early 1600s began, the notion of Christendom, the western Latin religious community that encompassed European people from Portugal to Poland, had been irrevocably broken into hostile confessional camps. The pain caused by the decay of the feudal order was expressed socially where it could be through the creation of new and mutually exclusive conceptions of God. This meant that when the peasants and townspeople, knights and burgers, princes and nobles of the Holy Roman Empire, came to open war over the spoils of a waning agricultural surplus, it would be with minds fired by conflicting visions of religious apocalypse and rebirth.

More simply and directly, most of what we want to talk about in this series will be done in the shadow of Luther. Sometimes literally in his name, sometimes by passionate true believers, and sometimes opportunistically and for material reasons by those who found justification or even cover for their motivations in the ideas about God that he nailed to that church door. In the next few episodes, we'll be moving backwards and forwards in history, giving more context about the political and social landscape of Europe that surrounded his life and then followed directly from the ideas he unleashed.

But we have to start with Luther, who had the right mind and critically was born into the right conditions to create a schism that changes the world that came before him into the world we have now. But only then, after much, much bloodshed. Martin Luther was, it was a chat, it was a pimp, he was an original five-tool player. He served, he slayed, he did not have to go that hard, but he put his whole goddamn Martin Lucy into it. This was a man who, if ever there was one, understood the goddamn assignment.

The original assignment understander has logged the fuck on. So great men, we all know, don't make history, but history does sometimes make men great. The social, technological, and economic conditions of Europe in the 16th century combined to create unprecedented pressures on the authority of the Catholic Church, and for a time, that pressure was contained almost entirely within the person of Martin Luther. It was Luther's particular and extraordinary combination of will and ability that focused that pressure onto the most vulnerable pillars of Catholic authority, and with a ferocious push set about its collapse.

I think we can lay our cards on the table early here and say we are both big ass Martin Luther fans. I mean, he's fascinating. That's for sure. I love talking about this guy. I love thinking about him. He's one of those guys you look at, and you can see, yeah, he's a Hegelian figure if ever there was one, embodying a historical moment.

If Napoleon was history on horseback, then Luther is history on the toilet. We'll get more into that in a little bit. Martin Luther was born on the 10th of November, 1483, in Eiselben, in the Saxony area of central Germany. His father had navigated the labyrinth of feudal debts and obligations to move from the son of a peasant smallholder to a copper smelter, eventually establishing a small but stable mining concern. Luther was sent to university in nearby Erfurt, where it was expected he would eventually study

law and become a lawyer, improving upon his family's upward ambitions. Luther's dad, by the way, was a sort of self-starter who made up the bulk of the advancing bourgeois of this period. He was motivated enough himself to take advantage of the loosening feudal obligations of life in rural Germany to save money performing agricultural wage labor enough to move to a city and invest the savings in a profitable business. These are the people who are going to make the religious revolution that Luther ends up embodying, the urban bourgeois here.

For the Luther family's case, that investment was in the mining sector, which exploded during this period because of technological advances in mining technology. In addition to making a bunch of fortunes of up-jump peasants like the Luthers, it also, along with all the New World Medals coming from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial projects, together those things sparked a price revolution that filled the continent for the first time really since the fall of the Roman Empire with hard species currency. That helped supercharge economic advancement during this period. Which had been stagnant for centuries.

Exactly. So, while the Luthers are prosperous burgers and the patriarch Hans becomes a counselor in the town of Mansfeld, even then though, their fortunes rest as many bourgeois fortunes did on a shaky foundation. Hans Luther never owned the mines he worked. He always leased them with borrowed money and he was never able to actually pay off those debts until just a few years before his death. So he was clouded by the fear of bankruptcy basically his entire life.

So the shortest path to secure a prosperous future for the Luther family going forward for a family that did not have landed holdings was the same one that was taken by most of the bright children of the emerging bourgeois. And still to this day. To this day. Get a degree and work for the imperial bureaucracy. Get a job as a lawyer within the Byzantine court structure of the Holy Roman Empire. And through that public sinecure raise the family's fortunes.

Not as often happens to young men at a crossroads torn between a professional life devoted to reason and the search for something more. Luther needed a little sign to show him the way and in 1505 Luther was nearly struck by lightning caught in a terrible thunderstorm a few miles outside of Erfurt on his return to school. Terrified. Luther pledged his life to God if God would just spare his life and he survived the storm. In two weeks he had quit his academic pursuits and joined the St. Augustine monastery.

Throughout his life Luther was known as an intense brilliant charismatic and gregarious man. To his friends and intellectual allies he was dedicated supportive encouraging and to his enemies and detractors a capable challenging and sometimes vicious sparer to the many strangers he would encounter on his rise to fame a friendly and winning conversationalist instantly magnetic and down for a good hangout bull sesh. But most of all Martin Luther had the fucking heart of a poster. Absolutely prolific concise in love with arguing never editing never backing down never afraid

to make ad hominem attacks and call his enemies stupid evil or both and when pushed by an opponent into ever more radical points never retreating and in fact doubling down making those new points bedrock positions in his philosophy and theology. A man born for the forms 500 years before they were invented. So young Luther takes the tonsure and becomes a monk. His time is spent in long hours of praying fasting confession maintenance of the monastery and generally obsessing over God and salvation. Luther gave his entire life over to the strict structures of Catholicism and indeed Catholicism

provided structures for the entirety of feudal social life Matt the Catholic Church maintained its monopoly on ritual Christian life through an ecclesiastical bureaucracy that ran from the triple crown Bishop of Rome himself to the humble parish priest. Like all institutions of medieval life it was structured to reproduce the rigid structure of feudal class rule high church offices came with high salaries gained through compulsory tithes and often claims to a portion of the peasant produced agricultural surplus in land under their direct control. They were often purchased by members of the high nobility for themselves and second sons

who couldn't inherit their estates while celibacy was fitfully enforced largely to prevent the hereditary control of church offices familial dynasties could still be bred in the upper echelons of the church popes were known to appoint a cardinal nephew to high office at a young age to secure their interests. Uncle magic has the sanction of heaven and when we get to the 30 years war there's an important cardinal infant cardinal infant a little baby cardinal adorable 17th century boss baby. So for these high ranking church officials the average peasant or towns person would

have little interaction with them likewise the propertyless sons and daughters of lesser nobility who are often sent to spend a life in quiet contemplation as monks and nuns and cloistered monasteries and convents. In reality the monasteries often operated more like frat houses with drunk rich kid monks fat off tithes and free for most labor obligations running around the country stied stealing chickens and seducing farmers daughters. There's a reason there's a whole genre of renaissance paintings of fat jolly monks drunkenly contemplating huge tankards of beer.

Yeah the monasteries were failed son refugees exactly now confession and preaching the two church duties that we now associate with priests in Luther's time were largely carried out by friars who were sworn to various religious orders. They lived among the people in towns and use their advanced university knowledge to provide counsel to the flock and at the base of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were the humble parish priests the most humbly born and least educated clergy but the once charged with saying mass and administering the majority of the seven holy sacraments the ritual points of contact between the infinite compassion of God represented by his church and the common run of sinning

humanity. These rights the sacraments guided people through the ebb and flow of social life baptism welcoming new life into the church confirmation establishing the individual as a subject of the church once they were old enough to comprehend it penance through which transgressions were admitted and absolved the bestowal of holy orders by which the church built its bureaucracy and hierarchy matrimony by which people were confirmed in marriage and thus in the community extreme action the final rights to the sick and dying and the most important the Eucharist in which the church exerts its special ritual status were priests literally transformed bread

and wine into the body and blood of Christ allowing people holy communion with God and this physical reality the sacraments secured people in a cosmic order that ensured their internal salvation and as such bound them in gratitude and thanks to the church at least that was the idea now the sacraments or for the most part not inspired by any biblical scripture they were practices that had built up over the long centuries of feudal development after the fall of Rome when the church alone held social life together a task that was made considerably easier by the creation and monopolization of ritual affirmations of religious faith yes the church helped stand up the power of Europe's military aristocracy

but also competed for power with it not only did the pope control the papal states around Rome as a direct feudal ruler the church coexisted uneasily alongside dynastic rulers with their own claims to social authority in places like France and England in the more loosely controlled German lands of the Holy Roman Empire German bishops ruled over 25 major secular principalities as well as numerous archbishoprics and abbeys three of the seven electors who chose the emperor were princes of the church the intertwined secular and social power of the church only exacerbated the tension between embodying a faith that posited universal peace brought about by universal love and the renunciation of earthly pleasures and administering the

rule of a class of warmongering luxury addicted aristocrats some of whom wore the vestments of the church itself by the early 16th century though this tension between godly and worldly power in the universally dominant church had begun to show some cracks the previous century had seen a series of reform movements challenging church doctrine the law lords in England the cathars in southern France Alpigenzians if you're nasty and the husites of Bohemia to different extents they all confronted papal authority and sought to reinvent the church in a way to bring lay people closer to the true Christianity now every sacrament and religious order and practice

that we've been talking about so far that were established as Catholic tradition by Luther's time those were all developed by the church and response to different reform movements to neutralize them and co-op them right that that was their dialogue with this like fitful resistance to the contradictions inherent in this religious project and these were the people who are trying to resolve the paradox of trying to live for Christ in this sort of counterfeit Christendom and all of these elements that have been built up were done so to give people a greater sense of connection to the church itself right that's like it was a sent the friars emerge the religious orders emerge to speak to the spiritual lives

of people who require some sort of understanding for why things are the way they are yes to literally crack open the manual and like give you tech support for the church exactly and so so all of these things emerge and they all emerge in response to these reform movements some of them peaceful some of them violent and throughout the medieval and early modern era's these movements keep arising to challenge the existing state of affairs the society of orders that so constrained and exhausted the lives of an exploited peasantry and an oppressed urban population but since the church dominated the European social vocabulary resistance to the status quo invariably coalesced into critiques of the church itself they mixed

local concerns like the Czech speaking hussites alienation from a predominantly German speaking episcopy with more radical visions that recall the revolutionary promise of Christianity before it was assimilated into the power structure of the Roman Empire free and equal life as brothers and sisters in Christ sharing alike the burdens of toil for the benefit of all none of these movements were able to move beyond their parochial origins however thanks to the united violent opposition of secular and religious rulers as well as the absence of any mechanism for disseminating their ideas you can't get very far with a protest movement when you just have to like tell a friend about it it's not going to work not when you likely

don't even have access to a horse yes the hussite movement in particular cast a long shadow over central Europe following Jan Huss's execution for heresy in 1415 ohemia would face 15 years of armed conflict between Huss's followers and a crusade launched to eradicate them by the pope and Catholic rulers the hussites actually won this conflict and succeeded in securing some concessions from Rome for the free practice of hussitism in Bohemia so we see the beginnings of a worldly conflict here of just how powerful the pope will be over these regional religious practices but these guys are also obsessed with the minutia of Christian ritual like one of the main things people argue about what huss got himself burnt

at the stake over is the physical and spiritual nature of the Eucharist whether the bread became God which is good and correct Catholic doctrine or whether God became the bread which is a vile heresy punishable by death when huss was in prison awaiting execution he said I may be a weak goose which is what huss means in Czech language but more powerful and farsighted birds falcons and eagles will come after me incidentally huss's death by fire may be the source of the expression your goose is cooked yes so the consequence of this distinction is that the Czechs demanded the right to take both bread and wine yes with communion which had been denied them and it became the rallying point for the entire

movement is massacres battles raged for decades in the Czech Republic Bohemia over this question yes the ultra ultra quest itself just literally means both yes both ism give me give me the one give me the bread and so there is this ultra quest church that emerges which is the Catholic church and the greater power structures concession to essentially Bohemian self determination right the Bohemian nation at that point is self-conscious enough to assert its independence from a centralized authority and elect its own king for example and also administer its own reformed religion within its borders but of course it only does that because it defeats within it the more radical side of hussism the tabarites who were from the lower orders

who were opposed to the nobles who were the ultra quest no billet the ultra quest leaders and fought them for decades beat them many times but were eventually overcome and of course then the real class based element of this was revolt that was always there is eventually extinguished and leaving now a Bohemian church that is as much a a machine to perpetuate social domination as the Catholic church had been before it and you can see already in the ultraquism and the hussetism stuff that is going to be very important in this series is the unique linking in this time period between the cosmic questions of transubstantiation of God begin communion with the unique political character of things no coincidence that Bohemia

both gets its own king and gets its own religious order exactly because we're seeing the ability of people to express like a political project and political subjectivity for the first real time right but because of the deepening of the process of urbanization and and literacy all the things we're talking about but the only cultural language that is shared amongst all is this really is the language and the vocabulary of religion right so then there's one final piece of the pre-reformation world we have to come hell Christian spirituality intimately wove the concept of eternal punishment for worldly sin and ritual absolution through confession to avoid it by the late medieval ages another concept had come to dominate

the Christian mind purgatory idea is an intermediary state of cleansing fire where some souls who died in peace with God but still needing some purification are purified after death and that the prayers and devotion of the living can aid this process along this was very real very heavy stuff for the early 16th century mind and the sin penance purgatory chain was the currency of exchange both spiritual and physical between the church and the lay people because the church's role in enforcing social consent rested on its promise of access to divine grace it was commonly understood that very very few people in christened would be eternally damp hell was reserved for witches heretics and Jews those who consciously rejected

God's love people who were baptized into the faith and kept to its requirements could rest easy knowing that they would eventually be reunited with God in the hereafter leave it to the priests to spend all day worrying about God and fretting about his desires and trying to see into the mind of him as long as you went to church and did your tithing kept your head down give a little money the church every week you didn't have to spend so much time tormented by the mystery the unresolvable mystery of God yes the unfathomable horrifying mystery of God we have structures that are imbued with real meaning to you that assure you that that work is being done elsewhere yes we're taking care of it we're handling

it and it that is a huge immense weight off and I would argue that like the the emergence of the neuroses of modern you know secular western identity is the imposition of this unfathomable unanswerable question of God that we all now have to deal with as individuals in a way we never used to have to do there was somebody else to do that and that is what this story is ultimately about exactly and it's that promise that we have people working for you like the customer service line to God is open we we are hearing you we are valuing you it's that promise of relatively assured salvation that is the spiritual justification for secular commonwealth and secular rule of the princes it's the rule of the nobles

that allows the church to extend God's grace to any willing soul in christen them purgatory then was the spiritual justification for the institutions of the church itself easily accessible salvation universal salvation now that's a potentially destabilizing social force the concept of purgatory evolved alongside the sacraments as one more bureaucratic hurdle separating man from God that man needed the church to help navigate the relief of a quantifiable amount of purgatorial suffering for deceased loved ones could be had through pilgrimage to view holy sites and relics the sponsorship of intercessionary masses and for the people who lack the time and money for those sort of grand gestures the purchase of certificates

of indulgence aka get out of purgatory early parts ding ding ding indulgences if you had indulgences on your bingo card over it up circle it now so we have this increasingly unstable church bureaucracy mediating ritual and secular life and this obsession with the fate of the soul as an essential social force the early 1500s also saw a paroxysm of conviction that the end of the world was nigh christian faith was infused with a strong belief in the apocalypse the end of days the return of christ and the judgment of humanity but the conviction that such a moment was actually in the offing waxed and wanes with the tides of medieval and early modern history early christians had lived convinced that

christ's return would occur during their lifetime but the adoption of christianity by the roman authorities had the effect of sanding down the religions eschatological edges but following the fall of the empire the constant warfare misery and exploitation of life in so-called christendom triggered a cycle of social agitation that pointed towards an apocalypse both feared and yearned for the coming of the millennium the thousandth anniversary of christ's birth saw a continent wide spiritual agitation that was channeled by kings and popes of the latin right into a war to reclaim the holy land from the clutches of muslim infidels and in so doing hopefully bringing about christ's return they failed

at that but succeeded in securing a beachhead for christian control of the leaven that princes and knights spent the next three centuries fighting to maintain but by 1500 a date that was biblically as freighted with apocalyptic resonance as 1000 had been the infidel turk held not only jerusalem but constant and opal and threatened the gates of vienna the turk the muslim the ottoman they're in the continent how could this be they're knocking at the door the physical security of christendom itself was in danger and its secular rulers did not seem up to the task of defending it clearly many christians thought god's judgment was being rendered an annihilation was at hand the assurance of salvation offered by

the church felt more and more like a hollow promise there was an increasing sense that upon his return christ would not look with favor upon the works of his supposed faithful one thing that i've been thinking about in terms of trying to make this story relevant for modern listeners is by time we get to the thirty years war 1618 yeah we are closer to them than they were to the first crusade jesus that's true fuck right you know that's just a way to think about how relatively modern all of it's true and it's all if everything is moving faster every moment so this is all to say that europe in 1517 was primed for a rupture the church which had been the single force unifying these disparate political powers

that made up christendom was under growing stress its temporal corruption eating away at its spiritual authority its role as the intermediary between your soul and god was under question and the power of the princes to secure the realm from the godless invaders was faltering and so we return to the augustine monastery in vittenberg because on october thirty first fifteen seventeen martin luther sends his letter to the local archbishop complaining about the immodest sale of indulgences in the holy roman empire this letter contained a disputation of the power and efficacy of indulgences a collection of proposals for a scholarly debate on indulgences now known as the ninety five theses i think inarguably

the most powerful single letter of all time most powerful of posts yes the theses were later posted at the vittenberg all saints church door and quickly published in various cities in northern germany and though luther initially intended his disputation as a means for scholarly argument in the church and aligned academies and as indeed he had sent a similar disputation angling for a debate over scholastic theology just a month earlier so the ninety five theses are really his second album you know true yeah he remembers the first one flop big time yes it turns out nobody really cared about nerd ass scholastic points yes they wanted something spicy and they wanted something that was invested in

their actual lives exactly yes like oh you're telling me that these go to heaven tickets are counterfeit yes i've got so i've spent so much money on this so even while he had sent this letter this other letter a month earlier the immediate insane popularity of the theses quickly escaped academic circles through this still relatively underdeveloped technology called a printing press and as church officials began responding to luther's prompts attempting to dismiss them luther himself made the critical breach of cloistered debate circles by replying in vernacular german with his sermon on indulgences and grace in fifteen eighteen recapitulating his ninety five theses into a pamphlet of twenty brief paragraphs

this was an immediate massive hit being republished throughout germany going through multiple additions in the first year stimulating the entire german printing industry to the power of luther for many germans it was probably the first work of a living german author that they owned martin luther was a character type that is remarkably familiar to a modern observer not only did he have the combative and pedantic drive of a born poster his relationship with god was recognizingly modern in its angst the story of his conversion by lightning was likely true in some respect but embroidered with the passage of time in the growth of the luther legend but his faith was never serene luther spent his early years as a monk struggling

with a deep awareness of his distance from god of god's fundamental inscrutability and of his own felt worthlessness in comparison to him luther's mind was too restless to be satisfied with the simple articles of faith that the church existed to reinforce a significant intellectual turning point for luther and the generation of churchmen who would take up his banner was the fifteen sixteen publication of the renowned humanist erasmus of rhoderdams greek translation of the new testament this book brought the scriptures to life in a way church intellectuals like luther had never experienced before and by seeing the word of god in this new context opened a chasm between the doctrines and practices of the

church and the text that church was supposedly inspired by there's no mention of purgatory or most of the sacraments within its pages there is certainly was nothing about indulgences so where did this shit come from where did the shit come from while luther had been chafing for a while against the placid theology of the scholastics which implied that salvation was available to all who performed the good works demanded by the church it was the indulgence campaign and Saxony of the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel that provided the focal point for luther's anger at what the church had become as soon as a coin in the coffer rings the soul from purgatory springs is how luther described tetzel's sales pitch as he went

from village to village hawking indulgence certificates the proceeds of which would help finish the remodeling of st. Peter's Basilica in Rome and pay part of the debt elbrich archbishop of the city of manjaburg owed to the pope for the right to also claim the archbishop Rick of the city of Maine you're literally paying this guy to buy another archbishop yes it's why it you know it's wild stuff folks for luther the formal promise of indulgences to shorten the time loved one spent in purgatory was bad enough but much worse was what regular people not inclined to inspect the fine print thought indulgences were in a letter of complaint to Archbishop Albrecht Luther wrote I do not so much complain about the quacking of the

preachers which I have not heard but I bewail the gross misunderstanding among the people which comes from these preachers and which they spread everywhere among common men evidently the poor souls believe that when they have bought indulgence letters they are then assured of their salvation in exchange for silver the shepherds of the church were leading their flock into the spiritual wilderness this all generated in Luther a profound sense of alienation if the relief of suffering supposedly the reward for a sincerely felt remorse for the commission of sin could be purchased so cheaply then how could the sincerity of anyone's faith be trusted the truly contrite would recognize God's chosen punishment as justice only the

false hearted would seek to avoid the suffering that God had ordained as the true price of sin and yet those were the people that the church now assured of salvation on top of that was this it was the assumption anathema to Luther that God's will could be swayed by the prayers of a priestly or even saintly middleman Luther's disenchantment from the spiritual basis for church doctrine generally and the practice of indulgences specifically as well as his ability to amplify that disenchantment into a continental movement was only possible thanks to the advent of print technology Luther read a printed edition of Erasmus's Greek New Testament print is how Luther was exposed to the humanist scholarship that convinced

him that the donation of Constantine the Roman imperial degree that ceded control of the Western Roman Empire to the Pope was a forgery print allowed for the production and distribution of certificates of indulgence on a mass scale and print gave Luther the ability to take his critique of the church beyond the ivory towers of theological disputation and reach a popular audience this is why Luther called printing God's highest and extremist act of grace by which the business of the gospel is driven forward and the last flame before the extinction of the world. So now while printing had been an established technology for over 60 years and had in that

time been crucial in creating a new class of literate townspeople who were able to buy bibles and religious commentaries by figures like Erasmus it was still a relatively boutique industry lacking a mass demand for products you know if you were noble you would buy some books basically as an ornamental thing you know yeah so as a flex yeah as a flex look I got look at this I got like 20 books look at my shit I got virtual Gutenberg famously printed a Bible and then promptly went bankrupt and didn't get enough people to buy it the number of literate potential customers for printed material was rising but the business model of publishing discouraged all but a few centralized specialists to invest in

printing a run of books involved a significant upfront cost with no real way to anticipate how much public interest existed for any given book and by Luther's time most publishers kept themselves afloat by printing government documents and church documents including indulgences before Luther indulgences were like the number one thing actually printed by people yeah in the 15th century as many as 2 million certificates of indulgences were printed in Europe individual pieces of paper just fluttering about the town and most other books were yeah as we mentioned luxury goods for rich nobles or churchmen to show place their libraries yeah Luther's incendiary critiques of the church created for the first time an expansionary publishing

industry the townspeople of Germany many fed up in their own way and for their own reasons with the preachings and practices of the church became a rapacious market for Luther's writings which were designed to be digestible and understandable to a lay readership the wide distribution of printing presses in Germany in contrast to the concentrated printing industry centers of Italy and France allowed for a rapid transmission of Luther's words to a hungry audience who proved quickly that they were willing to purchase anything with Luther's name on it what topic could be more compelling to potential literary customers than the destination of their immortal souls hmm presses popped up like mushrooms to cover the surging demand Wittenberg itself

had only acquired a printing press in 1502 as a vanity project of the Saxon elector Frederick but soon the city became the heart of a north German publishing industry that flooded the empire with Luther's polemic in the two years after the posting of the 95 theses Luther published 45 works 25 in the theological lingua franca of latin 20 in vernacular German put out 291 editions 21 of them were eight pages or fewer all of them were filled with punchy muscular direct prose perfectly calibrated to reach and affect a mass audience Luther's theological insights could only be transformed into a creed capable of mobilizing vast forces against the established church due to his literary genius and mastery of the business

of mass communication and not to put too fine a point on it but you know just want people to be thinking about you know sudden new access to a vast amount of information changing the way people conceive of themselves and their relationship to power structure relationship to other people like changing their consensus on understanding of reality yes hmm interesting so over the next few years Luther engages in essentially a flame war with various representatives from Rome he publishes at an insane pace for the time everything from responses to detractors further arguments against church doctrine commentary on the Bible and tracks expanding the tenants of his new understanding of the Christian faith and as he's writing them as

Matt says the capacity of the printing industry is exploding around him and Luther became the most published author of his time not only that but Luther directly supervised the technical production of his printed works helping merge innovative design flourishes with from the Wittenberg artists like Lucas Crannick which made his works instantly visually recognizable while managing production schedules and divisions of additions between publishers to maximize the impact of his release schedule and anticipate the desires of his audience he was building a religion he was making a brand did a genuine superstar of a new information age and perhaps one of the first people we could recognizably call a celebrity in their own time there are

extant pictures of Luther that were sent by him as gifts to admirers that he is signed at the request of the person meaning he was given out autograph he's given out autographs given out headshots we're actually talking about this last night of who could the first celebrity been and well it was pointed out that you know you maybe Caesar was on coins or something but you couldn't read his word right you couldn't know his own mind yeah like that a celebrity is like a is a new category like an intermediate sort of figure yes below the demigods of like traditional power you could have a parasocial relationship with Martin Luther indeed

so obviously the Pope can't let this stand and in 1520 Pope Leo the 10th issues a papal bull threatening excommunication unless Luther recanted his beliefs in 1521 Luther is brought to the diet of worms diet of worms no thanks a meeting of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire under Emperor Charles the fifth who we will get to next episode to account for his heresies after a tense trial Luther steadfastly refuses to recant and is declared an outlaw by the Emperor Matt you want to give the famous line he supposedly says to Charles refusing to relinquish his beliefs here I stand I can do no other pimp Chad awesome when we get into who exactly Charles the fifth is next week the sheer balls of that statement will

be even clearer but before Luther can be taken into custody Frederick the wise of Saxony the elector of Luther's region organizes a fake kidnapping and spirits Luther away to seclusion in the Warburg Castle while in luxurious custody Luther is corresponding with his allies among the clergy in the estates he wrote more pamphlets he began to his work of translating for the first time the Bible into vernacular German so that the common people could finally encounter the word now Frederick the wise is one of the most enigmatic characters of the entire Reformation once Luther had been excommunicated in place under papal and imperial interdict Frederick could have arrested Luther at any point I believe the nature of that law was

basically like it was legal to just kill you could legally kill Luther any anybody in the in the fire nobody in Saxony could kill Luther without facing the wrath of the elector which was his choice but it wasn't seemingly due to any real theological agreement with Luther the pride of Wittenberg Cathedral which was Frederick's project was his collection of 19,000 holy relics which included a vial of the breast milk of Mary and a twig from the burning bush and officially if you were to take a pilgrimage to see these objects you would grant be granted a collective 1.9 million days of relief from purgatory I just want to really highlight that detail as an illustration of like how hilariously prescribed and formulaic

and just like unsentimental the indulgence trade was you see the 19,000 relics you get 1.9 million days off relief from purgatory like how is a day even measured in the eternal hell fire of purgatory you know you're floating in this like post life of void of spiritual fire while the heavenly Father Lord God creator of all reality purifies your soul to receive his grace and you're just like looking at your watch thinking damn glad I saw that breast milk I could have been 1.9 million in one day so it's no wonder that this whole scheme was so alienating to people why it is purgatory is an attempt to fill in a gap created by the newly urbanized social order it's like people are asking questions they

didn't have time to ask before you got to have answers and over time it just becomes less convincing people still have too much time on their hands yes and when they start writing to each other too much ability to compare notes yes exactly you know I don't want to go too deep on this note but I think it helps see these people in a more a slightly more sympathetic perspective because it's easy to think like oh these illiterate medieval mud farming peasants like venerating these obviously fake relics oh yeah sure that's a twig from the fucking burning bush somebody kept that in their pocket for two thousand years but I do think that the wild receptiveness among the public to Luther's critique of

indulgence this shows that yes these people knew this was bullshit even when they're deeply held Christian convictions they knew they were getting scammed which I think is a relatively eternal feeling among humans knowing society is screwing you in some way even if you're just waiting for someone to come along with the right way to describe it to you yeah I mean they've honestly a lot of them could have seen indulgence is more of like having to buy a Girl Scout kickies from like yeah exactly workers kid I gotta do this again yes fuck off someone comes along and say and this was actually a big thing for the burgers someone comes along and says hey you can have a cheaper church and they're like ding ding

I'm listening so Frederick never publicly broke with Catholicism is the weird thing he may not even have ever met Luther in person but he steadfastly refused every demand by Pontiff or Emperor to suppress Luther or his writings and took the extraordinary step of having Luther kidnapped off the road from worms to prevent his assassination now why he did this is not really well understood he never wrote it down but part of the explanation may rest with Frederick's desire to see his domain of the elect of electoral Saxony which was a far Eastern backwater when it was split from the richer and more urbanized duchy of Saxony became a headquarters of humanist

scholarship and to remember out the atmosphere of free inquiry that scholarship required and you know what he's still but he's known as Frederick the wise today so you know what he got the brand like you can really see the Reformation in part as the result of a stature building contest between two branches of the Witten dynasty the Albertine and the sat Ernestine right who had inherited Saxony after their ancestor had split it up between the two sons which is a peculiar form of premogenitor that only occurs in this specific part of Europe during this time yeah and we will get to how insane that makes everything so what happened was is that two sons inherited the the Saxony one got to choose how it was divided and then

the other one got to pick which one they got classic serving a birthday cake method yeah and so while you have the duchy being much richer and more urbanized the electoral title is held as essentially a consolation prize in the more remote part but that that rivalry that his desire to not be a backwater and to fund a church or to fund a university and to have a popular writer and thinker and then to have this incredibly profitable printing industry emerge and this renaissance of learning that comes with it and all these students coming flooding the Wittenberg this is this is helping him in his competition his stature competition is a prince of the Holy Roman Empire right and that is a key component of

understanding the Reformation is such yes because again literally anybody could have murdered Martin Luther at any given time if it wasn't for exact Freddy the wise and it's clearly not because he was hit by a bolt from the blue but from God's will yes so well hold up at the Warburg Castle Luther corresponded with leaders of his nascent movement and his colleagues back at Wittenberg while commencing work on the first translation of the Bible into German part of a project as we said to make the word of God accessible to the masses by creating what he called a priesthood of all believers meanwhile throughout the German lands Luther's message created a groundswell of popular enthusiasm among the literate population

of the towns that saw communities begin to organize their own local churches in defiance of the demands of Rome so there's this period from 1517 to 1525 where Luther's Reformation is spreading relatively unchallenged in central Europe I mean yes he had been branded a heretic in an outlaw and it was technically legal to kill him on site but he had the protection of powerful princes like Frederick Luther's message had a hyper receptive audience and as a bonus actually appealed to the aristocratic elites looking to assert independence from the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire but in 1525 we see the first widespread movement of the Reformation getting out of Luther's control as hundreds of thousands of peasants inspired

by Luther's ideas now being taken increasingly in radical anti-authoritarian directions by new preachers like guys like Thomas Munster rose up in violent opposition to their feudal lords now we've been discussing Luther's criticism of the church in theological terms but since the church was perhaps the single institution most vital to the maintenance of the feudal order Luther's movement immediately developed profound political implications each class within the empire process these implications differently depending on their material position and interests the imperial princes most notably Philip land grave of Hassa land I love land the grave is the land graves and the margraves are my favorite ones obviously yes warm and

comfortable in their castles saw in Luther's challenge an opportunity to rest from the church the tithes and indulgence monies that flowed out of their territories and also to undermine the emperor's authority as defender of the papacy the merchants and guild leaders of the towns less idle than their aristocratic betters but still dependent upon the expropriation of peasants or pluses imagine drastically reducing the costs of the church while also claiming for themselves the church's social authority in the countryside the peasants groaning under the weight of accumulated centuries of feudal taxes and dues as well as new innovations such as the enclosure of common land suffering from a punishing cycle of poor harvest and

famines the most recent of which lasted from 1515 to 1519 curious that there's a famine right when this whole thing is very weird how that happens saw something altogether more radical in Luther's call to empower the laity if the church was not necessary to secure the salvation of the soul then the rule of the princes and nobles that supported the church was just as superfluous if a community could tend to their spiritual needs collectively without a hierarchy of media to mediate it could do the same with their material needs the fires of peasant rebellion were kindled by a number of radical itinerant preachers some former clergy like Luther some enthusiastic layman who traveled throughout the lands preaching

a vision of collective action that would sweep away the feudal religious structures of corruption and bring about the founding finally and for good of God's kingdom on earth rather than wait for a spurious reward in the hereafter these preachers insisted that the common peasants of Germany possess the power to find their reward in the here and now in the struggle to build a true Christendom where the labors and rewards of existence would be shared equally the most influential and energetic of these preachers was a former priest and early follower of Luther named Thomas Munster Munster spent the years before 1525 agitating crowds towards a violent confrontation with godless secular authority in town after town in sermons and

pamphlets often one stepped ahead of the jailer in the imperial city of mullenhausen Munster published a piece saying all the world must suffer a big jolt there will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats and the downtrodden will rise that's a that's a heavy stuff yeah you can get in big trouble saying that kind of stuff to people seriously Munster spent this time in written argument with Luther and his wittenberg confederates who refused to endorse his radical extension of the logic of reform luther responded by challenging Munster to a public debate debate me bro but Munster who referred to Luther as that easy living flesh of wittenberg had more vital priority these guys the the pros

that these guys sling at each other so good just a Nile it's just the best the best insults of all time yes so in 1525 peasant bands throughout southern germany began communally resisting the authority of their alleged overlords it began with mass refusal to remit taxes but soon enough spread into a series of interlocking arm revolts that involved tens of thousands of peasants led in many cases by disaffected imperial knights with military experience how you got all these vets sitting around with nothing to do and and who had had their feudal prerogatives clipped by the empire and the princes these disaffected knights from the swiss alps to the eastern border of the empire they burned castles and monasteries

they destroyed feudal contracts and while doing so they promulgated a political project based on the abolition of unjust taxation and the end of enclosure of common lands and equal justice before the law the most important expression of this project was the 12 articles which like most of the peasant proclamations was actually composed by literate townspeople allied with the movements amidst calls for economic justice were demands for the rights of communities to choose their own pastors all the demands were shot through with approving references to Luther's critique of the old order the third article of the 12 articles began it has until now been the custom for the lords to own us as their property this

is deplorable for christ redeemed and bought us all with his precious blood the lowliest shepherd as well as the greatest lord with no exceptions thus the bible proves that we are free and want to be free the princes of the empire were slow to respond but eventually began marshaling their own mercenary armies to combat the peasants while the princes tried to put out the fires by agreeing to peasant demands temporarily while using periods of truce to gather forces to land a death blow luther watched from vittenberg in horror the beneficiary of the sacks and electors protection and patronage and had been gifted the use of the monastery he lived in as a monk but still luther had nothing but contempt for

most secular princes who he called quote generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth but he considered them necessary to uphold the system of laws that kept people from succumbing to their basest sinful instincts such as failing to share their crop yields with hungry churchmen any political order that gave him the freedom to ponder the great questions of faith and comfort and security instead of tiring himself out behind a plow adobe and righteously ordained by god for luther the only way that people could live in christian peace was under the watchful gaze of godly overlordship while the peasant forces lost cohesion and purpose due to their inability to coordinate their activities over distance

or operate from a unified command structure and the princely armies began disarming and massacring them in detail luther wrote a book meant to resolve any ambiguities that may have been perceived about his stance on the legitimacy of rebellion against the state as opposed to rebellion against roe totally different shortly after the climactic battle of frankenhausen which saw the troops of philip of hessa and frederick the wise butcher over 5000 peasants and execute thomas munster after torturing him for days against the robbing murderous hordes of peasants hit bookseller's shelves of the peasants luther wrote they must be knocked to pieces strangled and stabbed covertly and overtly by everyone who can just

as one must kill a mad dog their four dear sirs help here save here stab knock strangle them everyone who can and should you lose your life bless you no better death can you ever attain god damn man any loss of respect that luther suffered in the eyes of the common people of the holy roman empire which was considerable he was pelted with rocks in the town of orlamunda was more than compensated for by the respect luther gained in the eyes of the empire's noble class luther really never recovers from this totally his personal influence in the reformation movement can be said to distinctly begin to drop it around this point other people more in vernacular leaders in different parts start to take

up a local influence because his authority has been undermined right by his by his public siding with with the nobility right but he does gain that legitimacy is it's nice to have powerful friends right the peasantry divided by geography and customs intermittently illiterate had shown themselves incapable of seriously challenging for power leaving the princes and nobles free to shape the reformation as they saw fit they would build a church inspired by luther that carried within it an instinctive hostility to the common masses of europe a hostility that would go on to shape the secular liberalism that would follow Protestantism

by this point the reformation had largely been constrained to the imperial cities where town councils were able to remake religious order as they saw fit the electors land graves in dukes of the realm were more circumspect seeing in luther both a potential tool to enlarge their power and wealth but also a potential threat to the stability of their existing power and wealth the peasants war of 1825 helped convince them that there was no longer any containing the popular energy and least by luther's movement and it was therefore the safest course to allow themselves with luther in order to direct the energies away from the empire's economic foundations and towards the anti christ of Rome for his part

luther was not over much troubled by the betrayed feeling of those who had sympathized with the peasant rebels and thought luther would support them in a letter to a friend he wrote he that will not understand let him not understand he that will not know let him be ignorant it is enough that my conscience pleases god it is funny that like once you crack open the door of being like hey i can actually interpret the bible yes that you're like well all the things that immediately benefit me personally those that happen to be the exact words of god it's like wow it as soon as i no longer have to subordinate myself to a social structure and can determine my own relationship to other social objects i'm uh i'm always right let

me check here in the in the bible it says that it's good for me to be rich and have powerful friends who protect me and all the things that undermine that are actually wrong this is great i sure as hell hope that the contradictions of and cognitive dissonance of this spiritual identity don't create a cascade of neuroses that cripples generations coming after me now let me uh go write another 30 tracks about how the contradictions in a neuroses imposed by the other order are actually uh demons sent from hell yes yes anyway as luther's forging these positions allying himself with these princely interests the reformation continues to find its key audiences in urban denizens these wealthier more literate audiences

would have plenty of reasons to be attracted to luther's ideas church exemptions from city taxes the large amounts of real estate that could be reclaimed from church offices we're getting control over local schools and other institutions from roman influences even indulgences themselves had created mercantile problems they had to be paid an actual coin resulting in huge amounts of precious species bleeding out of german lands and into italy like literally your physical gold just sent away to pay for these fucking up your trade balance no good folks i can't have it it's bad for business and there's also the value of asserting power of the free imperial cities and lesser princely estates against the emperor

who is the defender of the catholic faith and who until 1508 had to be crowned by the pope himself but this was tough business there was a constant tension between just how far cities and princes could go and permitting the growth of the reformation before risking actual conflict with imperial power and just as this urban population was building the faith they were building the industry around it printing we can see the building of this industry and audience in raw numbers from 1500 to 1516 vittenberg printers produced just 123 books about eight a year mostly church tracks and documents for the university as i mentioned before essentially a boutique academic operation you know how most universities

have university presses now it's like that was basically all of it after the 95 theses from 1517 to luther's death in 1546 vittenberg printers churned out two thousand seven hundred twenty one works more than 90 a year probably more than three million individual copies about a third of these luther's own works and that's just vittenberg major printing industries grew in most major german cities boutique presses in smaller cities even portable presses to travel around with princes on military campaigns to spread the word of their victories each exploding with a similar growth and output by the mid 16th century the pace of publishing is enough to sustain regular broadsheets relating current events early news papers the print

revolution is changing in fundamental ways how the literate population relates to society and to each other literally changing people's minds not in the sense of like their opinions though it's doing that as well but how they conceive of themselves in society at a foundational level luther's agonized racing mind had been unsatisfied with the ritual symbols of faith represented by a compromised and earthly church he replaced them with a set of symbols that couldn't be alienated by any worldly institution biblical scripture literally the word reading the bible thinking about the bible speaking and writing to others about what the bible meant these were the new sacraments of christian faith a ceaseless mental regimen that worked

through the contradictions of living simultaneously as free beings and as subjects to an all powerful eternal sovereign this new kind of faith was deeply intuitive to a burgeoning urban population living lives that moved at a much faster pace and were much more mediated by alienated market institutions than their peasant cousins luther presented them with the christianity of the hearth contained in the pages of a book on a shelf portable and malleable as was necessary for those who sought to survive the competitive pressures of trucking and bartering in a desacralized environment defined by interactions with strangers or with friends that the demands of business required to be treated as strangers these evangelical converts could resacralize public

space through membership in a community of literate believers who shared the same mental landscape provided by luther's writings and the writings of his supporters the luther publishing boom not only simulated the accumulation and circulation of capital in german cities all that money that used to flow into vatican coffers to buy indulgences was now going to local printers and booksellers who used it to increase their capacity into higher workers it also created a spiritual environment fit to conduct business so while luther's building his princely aligned new church up in vittenberg others are pushing this reformation thing even further the towns of switzerland were nominally part of the holy

roman empire but had achieved functional independence for generations first in zürich under the leadership of olrik zwingli then in geneva under john calvin very important guy swiss free cities led the way for pushing luther's concepts to what they considered their logical conclusion but which luther and his allies saw as dangerous heresy again it's funny it's like you know no i already did it you just have to read it and go like oh you're right yes what you're still thinking why are you i've done i mean you're you're thinking the way i'm thinking your your brain's doing the same thing to my stuff that i did to the other stuff no you can't do that that's not allowed zwingli died in battle before zürich really put itself on the map as a site of theological

innovation but geneva was a different story geneva had successfully negotiated independence from the duke of savoy and operated as an independent republic at the time a prosperous merchant city primed for protestant innovation the city's position as a merchant city at the crossroads of germany and the increasingly protestant southern france allowed calvin another preacher of seemingly limitless energy and eloquence to emerge as the main rival to luther's claim of spiritual authority turns out much to luther's irritation that a priesthood of all believers absent the guiding hand of a church hierarchy or a king of the church who literally wore a crown and said what was right and what wasn't won't all come to the same conclusions

so yes now luther didn't start off his project with the intention of destroying christendom at first he assumed adorably that his undisputedly correct interpretation of scripture would inevitably lead to church reform he's got the args people he's got the args folks people see the args and they will come to the right you will win the debates and then they will be forced by the logic of his argument to concede to him because they don't they want to go to heaven doesn't everybody want to go to heaven yes so luther's reform movement would be the triumphant capstone of a series of reform movements that have been fixtures of the church since its foundation but his excommunication and the repression of his followers wherever allies of rome were in power

disabused him of any hope of changing the church that way uh it would have to be destroyed root and branch because if these people would not see the light of god it meant that they must by definition be under the spell of satan right it's the only way to explain their failure to come to the same conclusions as him when you only have two choices god or saint it's gotta be one of the other these are the correct arguments and you still don't agree with me i'm afraid you have tested positive for the devil um so that means that the church went for being this institution that he was hoping to reform to one that had to be destroyed and replaced right uh in and this destruction uh must be waged by the people and the only people who could wage a war of destruction against the church

uh were the princes of the empire right people like uh frederick the wise and philip of hessa who had access to vast state revenues who had the power to dis an authority to dispense justice raise armies and go to war as secular rulers began reforming the church in their own domains Lutheranism as a practice began to take shape it meant a church that maintained many of the hierarchical structures of Catholicism only administered by these secular states rather than by the Vatican princes would appoint preachers and fund the primary schools necessary to spread the literacy scriptural appreciation demanded luther had condemned five of the seven sacraments as unbiblical but insisted on the validity of infant baptism and the Eucharist even if the

communion wafer may not turn into the body of christ as a catholic church taught luther dismissed transubstantiation as basal superstition but the ritual of the Eucharist still held for luther a real presence of christ it just i just love how much you got to think about this little piece of bread yeah it's like as it comes when it comes down to is that luther had a subjective emotional experience with the Eucharist that he could not explain away and the reform critique that said no there's nothing here could not be defeated because it's not in the bible yes but at the end of the day this new type of uh religiosity can't it can't express subjective truth well that's the you know that's the the conflict that rages at the heart of him is that he's all about

the args he's all about the the by your logic but in the end he feels he feels he feels something but i feel it's there so it has to be and he he cannot argue with and he's and he's it's a career of invective like he's screaming his lungs out for his entire career as a writer and he's incredibly bilious and combative and it's because he's trying to hammer everything into people's minds he's trying to hammer his whole heart and soul onto the page but there is this law there is always a latency and a loss of resolution right through translation right and by the time it becomes mere text as powerful as it is it's going to become uh denatured and new people looking at it are not going to engage with the ideas the same way and so the question of the Eucharist becomes this uh

incredibly important one because so much unspoken emotion right rests at the heart of it right uh the remaining sacraments that luther held to were meant to connect believers to the institutions of this new Protestant church right so the institutions that luther and the secular authorities who rallied to luther's banner in the decades after the diet of worms saw as the only bulwark against catholic power who they saw in increasingly demonic and apocalyptic terms so in the independent swiss cities away from the uh power politics of the empire itself towns people and preachers like swingley and calvin felt free to push beyond luther's self-imposed boundaries they noticed that the Eucharist had no more scriptural bases

than any of the other yeah that luther hit with himself was busy writing this invective to condemn so land grave philip of hess that doltish enthusiast of the early Protestantism attempted to heal the breach between luther and swingley on the question of the Eucharist before could permanently divide the evangelical movement at the colloquy of marburg i love the names for everything we love them don't we colloquy when was the last time we had a good we had a colloquy in centuries let's get a colloquy together after this let's do it guys all right in 1529 luther and swingley carried out a grueling debate on the metaphorical and literal content of the scriptural phrase this is my body on the first day of the debate swingley frustrated with luther's

stubbornness asked should then everything go according to your will even though he had every incentive to accommodate those who saw the Eucharist as purely metaphorical in the interest of maintaining unity luther could not agree he was in his words shackled i cannot escape the word is too strong and this is back to what we were just say it's like i you can feel luther despite his eloquence despite his argument you can feel him struggling with the page with the word with his own brain to be like why can't i make you see what is inside my zone he is running against the limitations of language as a communication of truth and and he is stuck in he's in this tragic relationship where he can never reflect on it yes and disengage from it because it destroys him

over time not only did the swiss fanatics as luther called them adhere to a strictly literal Eucharist they also asserted the clergy appointments and church governments were the business of the church members themselves and while luther had was content to live the contradiction between free will and god's will kelvin insisted on living instead with the full implications of predestination a doctrine that had been promulgated by st augustine but largely ignored by theologians until luther an all-powerful god knows who will be saved and who will be damned no human act from prayer to charity can sway that decision that might sound like a bummer but it was a doctor perfectly suited to the realities of urban power politics in geneva kelvin brought together an

alliance of leading citizens to exercise secular power while also dominating the newly formed civil church their brand of uncompromising austere belief propagated by kelvin's own prolific writings would be hugely influential in the towns of southern france the spanish netherlands and the rhineland which is coincidentally were huge trade road runs exactly very weird yes yes as luther's reformation spread and splintered other sex were becoming even more radical kelvin may have disparaged the eucharist but there was one sacrament everyone understood to be untouchable if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders infant baptism may not have been in the bible but it was the ritual that consecrated the relationship between citizens

and their sovereigns it's like the spiritual form of being issued a social security card basically you are now a citizen you are written into the books yes so by the 1530s groups known as the anabaptist promulgated a faith that bordered on anarchism they rejected infant baptism believing that only those who had freely accepted christ and confessed faith could be baptized and that faith rejected almost all forms of secular authority and it sought to build communities wholly outside the realm of established society sometimes including communal living and naturally these groups were seen as insanely radical and dangerous to catholics and magisterial lutherns alike and were violently opposed persecuted hunted and executed wherever they sprung up

including in switzerland in zwingli's zurich anabaptists were punished by being tied up and drowned in a river a classic case of okay you asked for it bro this spasm of radical reformation would reach its most dramatic edge in the german city of munster in the mid 1530s there a sect of anabaptist ministers with the aid of a wealthy merchant bernard nipper doling hell yeah we're able to stage a quasi-democratic coup of city government and enforced anabaptist principles through the secular civic authority this would include mandatory rebaptism a wave of iconoclastic destruction of church property and eventually confiscation of property and declaration that all property was to be held communally now soon the local archbishop led forces to lay siege to

munster and the isolated city descended into a frenzy of religious ecstasy as the anabaptist tried to create heaven on earth in the waning stores of their food reserves the stories of starvation forced polygamy violent persecution of unbelievers from the years long siege became a cautionary tale for over-enthusiastical formers after the archbishop's troops breached the city rawls and the leading anabaptists were tortured and executed their bodies were hung in gibbets from the walls of st lambert's church eventually the bones were removed but the cages remained to this day the munster rebellion bloodily confirmed the boundaries of religious innovation that secular authorities of all confessions would allow anabaptist sex such as the menonites would survive by

adhering to a strict policy of political quietism while seeking the sponsorship of sympathetic landowners most would eventually migrate to the new world the new jerusalem would not be found in europe the fact that the cages are still there on the church and munster is just reminding everybody what happens is like yes this is that you can go this far no further yeah i really want to see those cages someday that would be sick by the late 1530s luther had suffered at least one heart infraction his vision failed his eardrum had ruptured he had increasing heart pain general weakness and fainting his bowels failed him in fact for a guy who loves shit and fart joke so much for most of his adult life luther was beset by near debilitating constipation i think it makes

sense i think that's why he was always thinking of shit because he hadn't taken one yes he was wishing for the shit that never came yeah like there is a story that might be apocryphal that he came to his apotheosis his army he came to a religious epiphany around the question of faith because the thing that motivated luther the thing that made him believe that like he was giving people good news with his religious innovations was the other side of all of this question of hell and damnation was god's god's grace yes freely given yes and that is the other thing that he tried to communicate in his writing that ended up getting lost because it was this subjective experience of grace and he is sad apocrypally to have had it uh while trying to

take a shit we're trying to feel the release yeah we're trying to feel the release in it in like a castle turret uh we don't know if that's true or not but it certainly fits with his general lifelong fixation on the anus and on shit uh well just some choice uh scatological old humor from martin luther on on wishing that the pope would have read his own writings he said devil i have shit my pants have you smelt it and then later but if that is not enough for you devil i've also shit and pissed wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite yeah and of course his line about the la the end of his life yeah like as he as his health was failing and he was kind of coming aware of his own mortality he wrote i am a ripe stool and the world is a gigantic

anus and he was just waiting to be he's basically waiting to be pinched off yeah ah what a mind yeah something beautiful mind mm-hmm so luther spends his final years in vittenberg uh nurturing a growing family he had taken a wife katherina in 1525 corresponding with his associates solidifying a new church doctrine in Protestant lands and heaping increasingly dire abuse on his detractors in print as he wrote to his closest associate philip melanchthon and incidentally philip goes on to lead the church after luther but when we're talking about brands here martin luther clean simple rolls off the tongue philip melanchthon well it's even worse than that because so philip melanchthon might be the most simon pure dork ass nerd in world history he's up there with

like isaac newton just a pure just a little bookworm dork so he is a german theology student who was born philip schwarzfahrt which is in german black earth but because of his passion for the word of god which of course was in greek he changed his name to the greek equivalent of black earth with his melanchthon he is a fucking weeb for ancient greece because it's the language of the bible he was a weeb for the bible was his manga base yes but he was one of the biggest dorks of all time and he's very funny luther's ta yes and they have a very funny relationship because martin luther is this very this like incredibly charming personally garrulous chad yes life and kids just just stories of like was he'd roll through town you do a sermon and then

head over to the local pub afterwards and just like host everyone at the table and just like reball conversation he was a he was a classic german party animal type guy and in fact there is a collection of his of all of his conversations that he had while just like getting shit faced off of his wife's beer that she brewed yes and like eating trenches of stew it's called table talk and there's a lot of shit jokes in there yes but and then melanchthon is just this weedy little dork who like can't look anybody in the eye yes i mean for the amount of work that he did to build the he was hugely powerful but it could he's why he's this is a he's an example of why luther is such a singular figure in world history yeah because you can't imagine melanchthon

holding this on his shoulders the way luther yeah it's a reason that it's called lutheranism and not melanchthonism beyond just that it doesn't roll off the tongue yeah but anyway this is what luther wrote towards the end of his life to melanchthon i was born for this purpose to fight with the rebels and the devils and to lead the charge therefore my books are very stormy and warlike i have to uproot trunks and stumps hack at the thorns and hedges and fill the potholes so i am the crude woodsman who has to clear and make the path but master philip comes after me meticulously and quietly builds and plants widows and waters happily according to the talents god has richly given him he's an indoor kid god love him luther's luther's debilitating pamphlet

writing addiction was contagious an army of imitators both laypeople and clergy rushed to add their own contributions to the torrent of ink spilled in the course of building reformed religious institutions among them were some of the most powerful princes of the empire in 1541 frederick the wise's successor john frederick of electoral saxony engaged in a war of words with his fervently catholic vet and cousin from dukel saxony we talked about this earlier heinrich the fourth at one point in this literary duel duke heinrich published a pamphlet responding to john frederick called this is the name of the pamphlet well grounded steadfast grave true godly christian nobly inclined duplicate against the elector of saxony's second defamatory baseless fickle

fabricated ungodly un christian drunken god detested treatise that's the name of the work john frederick fired back with his response was titled true steadfast well grounded christian and sincere reply to the shameless calphurnic book of infamy and lies by the godless accursed exerable defamer evil working baribas also whore addicted hulfurness of branch and vague who calls himself du kind rick the younger go off calphurnic yeah this is basically this is why this is a rap battle it's about the actual rap battle of history this is what those really look like imagine somebody comes up to you and calls you a whore addicted hulfurness oh i it's go time is gloves are off one subject of bitter argument was whether martin luther had

ever referred to the corpulent elector as john sausage no matter how rich and powerful you are no one can resist the lure of a good public flame war and it reminds you why why billionaires are on twitter they can't get it it's like you see everybody doing this you gotta get in on it you you got to get in on everybody's having fun post everybody so much fun posting why can i do it as well it's a whole new fun thing to do like what else you do it like sitting at your throat trying not to like trying to ignore your hemorrhoids while like eating at another fucking turkey leg so i encourage everyone to get online and post to elan must that he's an evil working baribas yeah the 1540s also see luther direct invective at the islamic turks perhaps more

understandable as their armies encroached ever more over christian lands of southern europe and against the jews the screen against the jews was a relatively minor work in luther's time but as one might expect it was appropriated too much higher significance during a certain periods in a future german history luther's views on jews change over the course of his careers a reformer in his early days he writes approvingly of jews and sympathetically of jews claiming that the reason that they had to this point not reconcile themselves to christ is that they were uh alienated by the awful corrupt institutions of the catholic church which would seem reasonable and that now that the new uh scriptural biblical church had emerged

they could see the light but later in his career after that didn't happen and they all said no thanks we'll stay with our you know community and traditions and everything uh he said well then fine fuck you you deserve every colony every every given to you and that you should essentially there is a genocidal implication in uh in his work there at the end just like if you refuse to uh acknowledge uh you know christ you cannot you are not reconcilable to christendom again as he conceived classic like i've given i've given you the arcs exactly why you do it same thing like the catholic church the the the jews uh and the uh the turk it all has had to be destroyed to create a truly apocalyptic horizon on a rare trip to

his birthplace in isle bond martin luther fell suddenly mortally ill and died in february 1546 at age 62 in 30 years he had almost single-handedly shattered the unity of the christian church something that would have been unimaginable at the time of his birth he had worked tirelessly to build a whole new confession of christian faith one born out of scripture alone accessible to the common man free from the indecent mediating of some princely pope his work had redrawn the map of secular power along lines of faith Protestantism would be the common cause and motivation for alliances among northern german princes and in bohemia to the east Protestantism would soon be the ruling religion of scandinavia and denmark and the netherlands and after Henry

the eighth got too horny to obey the pope anymore england while catholicism would be protected by the hapsburgs in their lands of the southern holy roman empire in austria and in spain as well as in the stalwartly catholic france and of course italy these divisions would be the battle lines for nearly a century of religious violence and eventually the 30 years war luther had sought to convert christendom into a continental fellowship of believers all reading from the same hymnal by the time he died the holy roman empire was on the verge of war his rival catholic and luther and power centers marshaled forces to crush each other while kelvinist heresy spread throughout the cities of western europe without the disciplining structure of a universal

church universal religious truth broke down leaving instead a patchwork of churches tied to local regimes of power vying for control of territories and souls in northern europe while the pope and his infernal minions in spain italy and southern germany gathered their powers for a counter strike it was certainly not what luther had wanted when he set out his great project of reformation but luther died nonetheless content that it was all god's will if the people refused to heed his message it was because they were not worthy of it they would have to be tested and purified as he himself had been having given himself over to god's grace luther believed that no action he took in god's name could have been wrong now there's no evidence that he actually

told charles the fifth at verms here i stand i can do no other but there's a reason that that line has for centuries stood as luther's epitaph in october 1617 all across germany a massive jubilee was held to celebrate the centenary of martin luther's monumental act of defiance against the church 100 years of protestantism special sermons were preached plays commemorating the important events in luther's life choirs of children sang newly composed songs new broadsheets printed and posted commemorating the event souvenir medals were struck and handed out to participants a genuine festival of confessional solidarity that established luther's posting of the 95 theses as the foundational event of the reformation it's important to remember the event that we begin

this episode with the hammering of the seat theses was for this first hundred years considered one event among several that were the founding events of the reformation right it was the creation of this specific pageantry around this anniversary as a as as we'll say as a political project that gave that the historic truth to luther's posting of the theses as the beginning it is manufacturing history of which we are still retelling in the same way but hey it's a dramatic moment he's got a hammer a nail it's a broadsheet it is we got a lot of the thing is because what the because this was an event of pageantry they understood you got to pick an event that's going to give him a little juge yes and you can't beat a guy striding out there and hammering

something into a damn door this was not an organically developed event it was the plan of frederick the fifth elector of the palatinate himself a fierce calvinist designed to promote unity between all protestants in the holy roman empire and strengthen his anti-catholic political alliance yeah the whole thing was funded by the palatinate yes as a state as a soft power project basically he was the golden voice of the 17th century yes it was projected as a moment of peace and accomplishment the triumph of the reformation and establishing itself in stable opposition to the evil papist authority but remember the name frederick the fifth because within one year of the jubilee his fanatical devotion to these reformation principles

will drag all of europe into 30 years of hell on earth this first episode of hell on earth is free and public for all listeners all subsequent episodes will be exclusively for patreon subscribers to chapo trap house to subscribe today for the rest of the series as well as all of chapo's premium content go to patreon.com slash chapo trap house hell on earth is written by matt christman and chris wade with additional contributions in this episode by michael koze it's produced by me chris wade with editing from our co-producer nick koze show art and animation is from the great ben clarkson and you can find a supplemental interactive atlas for the series by john white over at hell on earth

dot chapo trap house dot com our theme music is by nick diamonds with additional music by alessandra tekeshi john erin's austin riley tyrant king blackout princess and stale cooper join us next week for the black death the universal monarch and what the hell is the holy roman empire anyway