The events of the PROTESTANT REFORMATION from its start in 1517 until the end of the THIRTY YEARS' WAR in 1648, examining its causes and its impact on the world.

2.  The Protestant Reformation was the sixteenth-century religious, political, intellectual, and
cultural movement that divided Catholic Europe; it paved the way for the systems and beliefs
that would define the continent in the contemporary age.
 In Northern and Central Europe, reformers like Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and
Henry VIII questioned papal authority and the Catholic Church’s ability to define Christian
practice.
 They advocated for a religious and political reallocation of control into the hands of Bible- and
pamphlet-reading pastors and princes.
 The Protestant Reformation elicited wars, oppression, and the Counter Reformation, the
Catholic Church’s late but potent response to the Protestants.

3.  Historians normally date October 31, 1517, the day
Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses (shown
right) on the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church,
as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
 Its ending can be placed at any point between the
Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which permitted
Catholicism and Lutheranism to exist together, and the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty
Years’ War.
 The core ideas of the Protestant Reformation – among
which was a need to cleanse the Church and a doctrine
that the Bible, not tradition, should be the lone source
of spiritual authority – were not themselves original.
 Luther and his supporters nevertheless became the
first to proficiently use the influence of the printing
press to give their doctrines significant support.
 No other reformer was more proficient than Luther at
using the power of the press to spread his beliefs.
 From 1518 to 1525, Luther circulated more writings than
the next seventeen most productive reformers put
together.

7.  Martin Luther (1483-1546) was an Augustinian
monk and university professor in Wittenberg
when he wrote his Ninety-five Theses, which
condemned the pope’s sale of indulgences, which
its sellers claimed were pardons from repentance.
 Though he wanted to reverse this practice and the
Church’s other misdeeds, he was summoned to the
Diet of Worms in 1521 and excommunicated.
 Protected by Frederick the Wise, Elector of
Saxony, Luther translated the Bible into German –
it took him only eleven weeks – and resumed
producing vernacular booklets during his time at
the Wartburg Castle in Eisenach.
 When German peasants, motivated by Luther’s
sanctioning “priesthood of all believers”, rebelled
in 1524, Luther supported the German princes.
 By the end of the Reformation, Lutheranism
became the main religious denomination in much
of Germany (mainly the north and the east; most
of the south and the west remained Catholic); it
also spread to Scandinavia and the Baltic states
(excluding Lithuania).

14.  The Reformation began in Switzerland in 1519 with the
sermons of Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), whose teachings
were mostly similar to Luther’s.
 In 1541, Jean Calvin (1509-1564), a French Protestant who
had the preceding decade lived in exile writing his
Institutes of the Christian Religion, was summoned to
Geneva and instigated his Reformed doctrine of God’s
power and humankind’s predestined fate; the Calvinist
doctrine also believes that Jesus died only for those who
were preordained; that God renews the individual where he
can and wants to choose God; and it is unfeasible for those
who are saved to lose their redemption.
 Calvin’s theology is known by the five-letter acronym
T.U.L.I.P. (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election,
Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the
Saints).
 The result was a theocratic establishment of compulsory,
harsh standards.
 Geneva became a safe haven for Protestant refugees, and
Calvin’s doctrines swiftly spread to Scotland, France,
Transylvania, and the Low Countries, where Dutch
Calvinism became a religious and financial influence for
the next 400 years.
 Calvinism remains the main religious denomination in
Scotland and Switzerland; it is also a main denomination in
the Netherlands (the other is Catholicism) and the second-
largest denomination in Hungary (after Catholicism and
before Lutheranism).
 The majority of Hungarians in Transylvania belong to the
Reformed Church in Romania.

16.  The Colloquy of Marburg was an important debate
about the Lord’s Supper held from October 1-4, 1529.
 The reason for it taking place was a political
situation; in response to a common resolve against
the Reformation by the second Diet of Speyer held
six months earlier, the landgrave Philip of Hesse
suspected that the Catholic rulers may intend to
defeat the Protestants by force and was certain that a
political coalition was the solution.
 Because the Lutherans asserted on a mutual
assertion as the source of alliance, Philip called the
colloquy to resolve the controversy regarding
the Eucharist, which had been driving a rift between
the Reformers since 1524.
 The principal accomplices at the
meeting, Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Johannes
Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer, and Zwingli (Calvin
was not present), held opening deliberations and
then held four meetings in the presence of the
landgrave Philip, Duke Ulrich of Württemberg,
envoys from contributing territories, and up to sixty
guests.

17.  The point in question during the debate focused on the essence of
Christ’s existence in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
 Christ had said, “This is my body,” to his apostles when establishing
the Eucharist, and Luther advocated the literal interpretation of the
statement.
 Zwingli argued that the Eucharist was a representative
commemorative custom, and he was ready to receive the doctrine
of the divine existence of Christ in the sacrament.
 Though Luther and Zwingli did not think that their disagreements
could be settled, Bucer, a member of the allocation from Straßburg
who spoke at the conclusion of the colloquy, had faith that they
could resolve those differences.
 After deliberations were halted on October 3, Luther, at the
landgrave’s wish, wrote the fifteen Articles of Marburg, based on
articles (later called the Articles of Schwabach) written at
Wittenberg before Luther left for Marburg.
 The first fourteen articles specified the generally accepted
collective doctrines of the German and Swiss South German
Reformations, which had not been debated at the colloquy.
 The fifteenth article specified that “at present we are not agreed as
to whether the true body and blood [of Christ] are bodily present in
the bread and wine.”
 The articles were debated, amended, and signed by the theologians
and were assumed by the landgrave as a declaration of Protestant
belief; some information from these articles was subsequently
included in the Augsburg Confession of Lutheranism.

21.  When the Reformation reached England, Henry
VIII (1491-1547) was searching for a male successor.
 Pope Clement VII refused Henry’s request to void
his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so Henry
asserted that he alone should be the final
authority in affairs pertaining to the English
church.
 Henry terminated England’s convents to impound
their fortune and worked to put the Bible in the
hands of the people.
 From 1536, every church was required to own a
copy.
 After Henry died, England switched to Calvinist-
influenced Protestantism during Edward VI’s brief
six-year rule (1547-1553), only to suffer five years of
backwards Catholicism under Mary I.
 In 1559, Elizabeth I assumed the throne; during
her rule that lasted until 1603, she cast the Church
of England as a “middle way” between Calvinism
and Catholicism, with vernacular worship and a
modified Book of Common Prayer.

24.  The Catholic Church was slow in methodically
responding to the scriptural and publicity changes
of Luther and the other reformers.
 The Council of Trent (shown right), which
convened off and on from 1545 until 1563, conveyed
the Church’s reaction to the difficulties that led to
the Reformation and to the reformers themselves.
 The Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation
age became more spiritual, more literary, and
more cultured.
 New religious groups, particularly the Jesuits
(officially the Society of Jesus), mixed strict
spirituality with a universally-minded
intellectualism, while spiritualists such as Teresa
of Avila instilled new passion into the older orders.
 Inquisitions, both in Spain and in Rome, were
restructured to combat the danger of Protestant
dissent.

27.  The religious consequences of the Reformation
and the Counter Reformation were accompanied
with profound and long-term political changes.
 New religious and political liberties in Northern
Europe came at a huge expense, with decades of
uprisings, wars, and brutal persecutions.
 The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) is believed to
have cost forty percent of the population of
Germany alone.
 Yet the Reformation’s positive implications are
visible in the academic and thriving that it
stimulated on all sides of the division—in the
improved universities of Europe, the Lutheran
church music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the
baroque altarpieces of Pieter Paul Rubens, and
even the entrepreneurship of Dutch Calvinist
traders.

31.  http://www.history.com/topics/reformation
 “Martin Luther: The Idea that Changed the
World”
 https://www.calvinistcorner.com/tulip.htm
 https://www.britannica.com/event/Colloquy-
of-Marburg