Podcasts about emperor charles v

Although kept on a leash by the Emperor Charles V, Cosimo I completes Florence's consolidation of the rest of Tuscany...except for one hold-out.

Dame Emmeline Tanner writes of the Renaissance that its "special characteristic was the revolt against authority and the rise to importance of the individual." Politically, "the Renaissance marks the death of the idea of the universal authority of the Empire." Ecclesiastically, "the period marks the breaking-up of the idea of the World Church and the rise of national churches. The authority of the Church was overthrown, and in Teutonic lands the Renaissance became the Reformation." This is a book about broad concepts and remarkable individuals: the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth of England, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William the Silent, and Philip II of Spain and his terrible Inquisition.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dame Emmeline Tanner writes of the Renaissance that its "special characteristic was the revolt against authority and the rise to importance of the individual." Politically, "the Renaissance marks the death of the idea of the universal authority of the Empire." Ecclesiastically, "the period marks the breaking-up of the idea of the World Church and the rise of national churches. The authority of the Church was overthrown, and in Teutonic lands the Renaissance became the Reformation." This is a book about broad concepts and remarkable individuals: the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth of England, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William the Silent, and Philip II of Spain and his terrible Inquisition.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dame Emmeline Tanner writes of the Renaissance that its "special characteristic was the revolt against authority and the rise to importance of the individual." Politically, "the Renaissance marks the death of the idea of the universal authority of the Empire." Ecclesiastically, "the period marks the breaking-up of the idea of the World Church and the rise of national churches. The authority of the Church was overthrown, and in Teutonic lands the Renaissance became the Reformation." This is a book about broad concepts and remarkable individuals: the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth of England, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William the Silent, and Philip II of Spain and his terrible Inquisition.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dame Emmeline Tanner writes of the Renaissance that its "special characteristic was the revolt against authority and the rise to importance of the individual." Politically, "the Renaissance marks the death of the idea of the universal authority of the Empire." Ecclesiastically, "the period marks the breaking-up of the idea of the World Church and the rise of national churches. The authority of the Church was overthrown, and in Teutonic lands the Renaissance became the Reformation." This is a book about broad concepts and remarkable individuals: the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth of England, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William the Silent, and Philip II of Spain and his terrible Inquisition.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dame Emmeline Tanner writes of the Renaissance that its "special characteristic was the revolt against authority and the rise to importance of the individual." Politically, "the Renaissance marks the death of the idea of the universal authority of the Empire." Ecclesiastically, "the period marks the breaking-up of the idea of the World Church and the rise of national churches. The authority of the Church was overthrown, and in Teutonic lands the Renaissance became the Reformation." This is a book about broad concepts and remarkable individuals: the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth of England, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William the Silent, and Philip II of Spain and his terrible Inquisition.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Text of ReadingsWednesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 409The Saint of the day is Saint CajetanSaint Cajetan’s Story Like most of us, Cajetan seemed headed for an “ordinary” life—first as a lawyer, then as a priest engaged in the work of the Roman Curia. His life took a characteristic turn when he joined the Oratory of Divine Love in Rome, a group devoted to piety and charity, shortly after his ordination at 36. When he was 42 he founded a hospital for incurables at Venice. At Vicenza, he joined a “disreputable” religious community that consisted only of men of the lowest stations of life—and was roundly censured by his friends, who thought his action was a reflection on his family. He sought out the sick and poor of the town and served them. The greatest need of the time was the reformation of a Church that was “sick in head and members.” Cajetan and three friends decided that the best road to reformation lay in reviving the spirit and zeal of the clergy. Together they founded a congregation known as the Theatines—from Teate [Chieti] where their first superior-bishop had his see. One of the friends later became Pope Paul IV. They managed to escape to Venice after their house in Rome was wrecked when Emperor Charles V's troops sacked Rome in 1527. The Theatines were outstanding among the Catholic reform movements that took shape before the Protestant Reformation. Cajetan founded a monte de pieta—“mountain or fund of piety”—in Naples, one of many charitable, nonprofit credit organizations that lent money on the security of pawned objects. The purpose was to help the poor and protect them against usurers. Cajetan's little organization ultimately became the Bank of Naples, with great changes in policy. Reflection If Vatican II had been summarily stopped after its first session in 1962, many Catholics would have felt that a great blow had been dealt to the growth of the Church. Cajetan had the same feeling about the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563. But as he said, God is the same in Naples as in Venice, with or without Trent or Vatican II. We open ourselves to God's power in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and God's will is done. God's standards of success differ from ours. Saint of the Day, Copyright Franciscan Media

The Edict of Worms condemned Luther's writings as heretical and prohibited their publication, distribution, and possession within the Holy Roman Empire. The edict effectively excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church and sought to suppress the spread of his ideas and ...

A newly free prince is on the hunt for his next fortune, but could there be a new heiress in his sight?As Barbara Hutton continues her South Seas travels, another rumor percolates involving a new love interest for Prince Alexis Mdivani. Will the new love triangle cause another rift in friendship? Meanwhile former Russian aristocracy hope that Hitler's rise to power will lead to a restoration of the monarchy and the eradication of the Communists from Soviet Russia.Other people and subjects include: Doris Duke, Nanaline Duke, Louise Van Alen – formerly Princess Mdivani, James HR Cromwell aka “Jimmy,” Princess Roussadana “Roussie” Mdivani Sert, Walter Winchell, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Nazi party, German Communists, McCarthy era, Lion Feuchtwanger, The Waiting Room book series (Success, The Oppermans, & Exil), Moscow 1937, play Salem Witch Trials, Arthur Miller, The Crucible, Earl of Warwick Charles Guy Fulke Greville, William Rhinelander Stewart, Gold Dust twins, Harold Lloyd, Arturo Toscanini, Oscar Theiben, Mrs. George Palen Snow – Carmen White, Napoleonic shoulder pads, Vogue & Harper's Bazaar fashion editor, Prohibition, monarchists, royalists, anti-royalists, dispossessed royals & aristocrats, King Alphonso XIII of Spain, Empress Maria Theresa, Emperor Charles V, Duke de Guise – Jean III, Hapsburg Empress Zita, King Otto, King George of Greece, Prince Philip, King Charles III, Hohenzollern, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Michael I, Jeanne Eagels, Jr., Jeanne Eagels, the Oscars, Academy Awards, face spanked – slapped, man burglar, nudist colony, newspaper research, digital archives, Charity Carnival, Judson Health Center, Saks Fifth Avenue, ocean liners, Bremen, Aquitania, Akron, Ohio, New York, Paris, South Seas, Sidney, Australia, French internment Camp des Milles, Apple tv series The New Look, Christian Dior, Catherine Dior, Coco Chanel, frenemy, rivalry, romantic competition between friends, past lingers into the present--Extra Notes / Call to Action:Goodpods Charts & Leaderboards for March 2024#16 Top 22 Top Indie Documentary Monthly chart#60 Top 100 Indie Documentary All time chart#62 Top 100 Indie History Monthly chart#70 Top 100 Documentary Monthly chartBest Documentary Podcasts [2024] Top 22 Shows - Goodpodshttps://goodpods.com/leaderboard/top-100-shows-by-category/society-and-culture/documentary?period=month&indie=true#33169411Best Documentary Podcasts [2024] Top 100 Shows - Goodpodshttps://goodpods.com/leaderboard/top-100-shows-by-category/society-and-culture/documentary?period=month#33169365Best History Podcasts [2024] Top 84 Shows - Goodpodshttps://goodpods.com/leaderboard/top-100-shows-by-category/history/all-history?period=month&indie=true#33182013Best Documentary Podcasts [2024] Top 100 Shows - Goodpodshttps://goodpods.com/leaderboard/top-100-shows-by-category/society-and-culture/documentary?period=alltime&indie=true#33169255Share, like, subscribe--Archival Music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance BandsSection 1 Music: Says My Heart / You Leave Me Breathless by Carroll Gibbons, Album EleganceSection 2 Music: Umtcha, Umtcha, Da Da Da by The Rhythmic Eight, Album Fascinating Rhythm – Great Hits of the 20sSection 3 Music: Royal Garden Blues by Benny Carter, Album Perfect JazzEnd Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands--https://asthemoneyburns.com/TW / IG – @asthemoneyburnsTwitter – https://twitter.com/asthemoneyburnsInstagram – https://www.instagram.com/asthemoneyburns/Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/asthemoneyburns/

The Early Tudors - Henry VII and Henry VIII by Charles Edward Moberly audiobook. Following the chaos of the Wars of the Roses, the reigns of Henry VII and VIII were autocratic and centralized to an unprecedented degree. This slim volume by the British historian and educator, Charles Moberly, provides many interesting details about the reigns of these two monarchs. But the author also offers a clear picture of the European context in which they acted: the Reformation struggle, the rivalry between the King Francis I and Emperor Charles V, the influence of the Popes, and the struggle for Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now queen of France, Catherine de' Medici is forced to form a somewhat unorthodox household with her husband Henri Diane de Poitiers. Meanwhile religious persecution and violence have been growing, and Henri prepares to once again face his and his father's nemesis, Emperor Charles V.  Check out pictures, bibliographies, and more at http://www.medicipodcast.com. Support the podcast on Patreon.

In the early 1500's the various church reform movements led by Luther, Zwingli and Tyndale tore apart the political landscape of Europe. Although many recognized the corruption and moral laxity of the Roman Catholic Church, they only advocated clean- up actions within. Why was it necessary to separte from Papal Rome-- At an Imperial Diet at Speyer John Calvin's letter to the Emperor Charles V was read. In it he sets forth the necessity of reformation and why the Protestants are not guilty of schism. On the contrary, the Papists had so corrupted the church in the vital areas of worship and salvation that a total reformation was needed. The church needed to return to the Bible as its standard and authority. So the Protestant Reformation was a necessity in order to rescue the church from the fatal disease of extraneous doctrine and practice that had engulfed the Roman Catholic Church.

In the early 1500's the various church reform movements led by Luther, Zwingli and Tyndale tore apart the political landscape of Europe. Although many recognized the corruption and moral laxity of the Roman Catholic Church, they only advocated  clean- up  actions within. Why was it necessary to separte from Papal Rome? At an Imperial Diet at Speyer John Calvin's letter to the Emperor Charles V was read. In it he sets forth the necessity of reformation and why the Protestants are not guilty of schism. On the contrary, the Papists had so corrupted the church in the vital areas of worship  and salvation that a total reformation was needed. The church needed to return to the Bible as its standard and authority.  So the Protestant Reformation was a necessity in order to rescue the church from the fatal disease of extraneous doctrine and practice that had engulfed the Roman Catholic Church. Bible Insights with Wayne ConradContact: 8441 Hunnicut Rd Dallas, Texas 75228email: Att. Bible Insights Wayne Conradgsccdallas@gmail.com (Good Shepherd Church) Donationhttps://www.gsccdallas.org/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJTZX6qasIrPmC1wQpben9ghttps://www.facebook.com/waconrad or gscchttps://www.sermonaudio.com/gsccSpirit, Truth and Grace MinistriesPhone # 214-324-9915 leave message with number for call backPsalms 119:105 Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.

In the early 1500's the various church reform movements led by Luther, Zwingli and Tyndale tore apart the political landscape of Europe. Although many recognized the corruption and moral laxity of the Roman Catholic Church, they only advocated clean- up actions within. Why was it necessary to separte from Papal Rome? At an Imperial Diet at Speyer John Calvin's letter to the Emperor Charles V was read. In it he sets forth the necessity of reformation and why the Protestants are not guilty of schism. On the contrary, the Papists had so corrupted the church in the vital areas of worship and salvation that a total reformation was needed. The church needed to return to the Bible as its standard and authority. So the Protestant Reformation was a necessity in order to rescue the church from the fatal disease of extraneous doctrine and practice that had engulfed the Roman Catholic Church.

Full Text of ReadingsMonday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 407The Saint of the day is Saint CajetanSaint Cajetan’s Story Like most of us, Cajetan seemed headed for an “ordinary” life—first as a lawyer, then as a priest engaged in the work of the Roman Curia. His life took a characteristic turn when he joined the Oratory of Divine Love in Rome, a group devoted to piety and charity, shortly after his ordination at 36. When he was 42 he founded a hospital for incurables at Venice. At Vicenza, he joined a “disreputable” religious community that consisted only of men of the lowest stations of life—and was roundly censured by his friends, who thought his action was a reflection on his family. He sought out the sick and poor of the town and served them. The greatest need of the time was the reformation of a Church that was “sick in head and members.” Cajetan and three friends decided that the best road to reformation lay in reviving the spirit and zeal of the clergy. Together they founded a congregation known as the Theatines—from Teate [Chieti] where their first superior-bishop had his see. One of the friends later became Pope Paul IV. They managed to escape to Venice after their house in Rome was wrecked when Emperor Charles V's troops sacked Rome in 1527. The Theatines were outstanding among the Catholic reform movements that took shape before the Protestant Reformation. Cajetan founded a monte de pieta—“mountain or fund of piety”—in Naples, one of many charitable, nonprofit credit organizations that lent money on the security of pawned objects. The purpose was to help the poor and protect them against usurers. Cajetan's little organization ultimately became the Bank of Naples, with great changes in policy. Reflection If Vatican II had been summarily stopped after its first session in 1962, many Catholics would have felt that a great blow had been dealt to the growth of the Church. Cajetan had the same feeling about the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563. But as he said, God is the same in Naples as in Venice, with or without Trent or Vatican II. We open ourselves to God's power in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and God's will is done. God's standards of success differ from ours. Saint of the Day, Copyright Franciscan Media

June 25 marks the day in 1530 when God-fearing leaders took their stand for the gospel and presented their confession of faith before Emperor Charles V in Augsburg, Germany. Even more than October 31, this day marks the birth of the Lutheran Church. Centered in Christ and focused on the free gift of salvation by grace through faith, the Augsburg Confession continues to shape what we believe, teach, and confess today.  The Bible reading for this message is Philippians 1:3-11.This is Part 3 in our summer worship series - The Holy Ministry.Support the showMessages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.To find out more about King of Kings... Please visit VisitKoK.com Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok) Email us @ info@visitkok.com Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

Pope Clement VII sells his soul to Emperor Charles V to get back Florence. Part of the bargain includes Clement essentially signing off on the death warrant of the Republic of Florence.

The Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90, commonly known as the Italian, is an orchestral symphony written by German composer Felix Mendelssohn.The Symphony No. 5 in D major/D minor, Op. 107, known as the Reformation, was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830 in honor of the 300th anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession. The Confession is a key document of Lutheranism and its Presentation to Emperor Charles V in June 1530 was a momentous event of the Protestant Reformation. This symphony was written for a full orchestra and was Mendelssohn's second extended symphony. It was not published until 1868, 21 years after the composer's death – hence its numbering as '5'. Although the symphony is not very frequently performed, it is better known today than when it was originally published. Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, chose the name Reformation Symphony.Gertrude Heinz, conductorCMD German Opera Company of Berlin

Pope Clement tries once more to loosen Emperor Charles V's grip on Italy, another revolution in Florence is narrowly avoided through one man's incompetence, and the stage is set for one of modern history's most notorious war-time atrocities.

 The Amati family; in this Series we explore the life and legacy of Andrea Amati, the masterful craftsman behind some of the world's most revered violins. In these episodes we delve into the fascinating history of Amati's life, his revolutionary techniques, innovations, and the enduring impact of his work on the world of music. Through interviews with experts in the field of history, instrument-making, and performance, we uncover the secrets of Amati's unique approach to violin-making, from his choice of materials to the meticulous attention to detail that went into each instrument. We also explore the rich cultural and historical context that shaped Amati's work, and the role that his violins played in shaping the sound of the Renaissance and beyond.   Transcript Andrea Amati Part I   A traveller passing through northern Italy's Lombardy in the 16th century would be struck by its beautiful plains, fertile meadows and abundance of grains and livestock. Large fields planted with wheat, alternated with meadows crossed with an intelligent system of irrigation ditches, and long rows of trees growing around the edges of the fields gave it that typical Po Valley plantation look. In the distance, on the northern bank of Italy's longest river, the Po, lay the bustling city of Cremona. East of Milan, on the flat Padana plains, it was described as being “rich in men and traffic”, an important commercial hub, and here you would find a strategic river crossing. In this city lived a handful of noble Cremonese families, owners of almost all the land in the surrounding countryside's, cultivated by peasants still living under a feudal system.  The crops they grew, of flax, wheat, millet, rye, and rice, would be transported into the city to feed its citizens. After Milan, Cremona was the largest and most important city in the state, bursting with tradespeople and merchants. Almost 50 percent of its inhabitants are artisans, and the wealth of the city is substantial. In the Duchy of Milan, Cremona contributes as many taxes to the Duke's coffers as the rest of the provinces combined, making it a noteworthy place indeed. This was an era in which transport via water was 20 times cheaper than overland. Goods and people were frequently passing through the city on barges, often coming from Venice, then on to the markets of all of Europe with their wares.  It was a transient place, an inland port even, where many people would pass through, stop and stay a while, then move on. But for those who stayed there, life was never dull.  In the year 1505, a Cremonese artisan called Gottardo Amati and his wife welcomed a little baby boy into the world. They named him Andrea Amati.  As was often the custom, their son would one day learn a trade similar to that of his father. Of this his parents were fairly certain. What they couldn't have known was that this child would grow up to be the first in a great dynasty of violin makers, whose instruments would grace the salons of royalty and become proud acquisitions of noble families across Europe, influencing every violin maker that would come after him. Whether they realized it or not. The Amatis.  You may or may not have heard of this violin maker. But hopefully by the end of this series you will be like, Amati, yeah sure. Which one? The father, the son, the brothers, the grandfather? Because yes, there were a bunch, five to be precise, spanning four generations and they all lived in the northern Italian city of Cremona.   In these episodes I'll be looking at the Amati family of Violin Makers, their extraordinary story that spans almost 200 years and the world changing events that moved their lives.  I started by talking to someone who knows a whole lot about this family. Violin maker, expert, author, and researcher in Milan, Carlo Chiesa. Carlo Chiesa I'm a violin maker and a restorer and the researcher on the history of violin making. To find the Amati workshop, first we must go to the city of Cremona.  The Amatis are all connected and if you look at the history of the Amati family of violin makers, that's the history of the Cremonese making for about two centuries because the Amati workshop was the  only serious workshop in Cremona for about 200 years. When you speak of Cremonese making,  of course you must start with the Amati workshop. Linda Lespets In the 1500s, Cremona was a city full of life, its streets filled with the sounds of clanging hammers and the buzz of conversation. It was home to a thriving community of artisans, each with their own unique skills and talents.  Half the population found themselves in trade, but the other half worked and survived by supplying manual labour for the domestic market. There were servants, shopkeepers, coachmen, navigators, bankers, blacksmiths, carpenters, woodsellers, farriers, instrument makers, the list goes on.  I spoke to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, author, and international man of mystery.  Benjamin Hebbert So, Cremona's actually a very interesting city, if you think of Italy and, you know,  Italy's got the sort of long boot kind of going down into the Mediterranean and then you've got the sort of, the top of Italy is sort of, kind of oval shaped, like the socks sticking out of the top of the boot. And if you take that area, the great landmass of Northern Italy, at the top and at the west, it's lined by mountains.  And then you've got the Adriatic Ocean with Venice on the other side. And right going through the middle is the River Po.  And that really connects everything. The Po becomes, by the time you get to the middle of Italy, it's a very wide river. So your last stone bridge is at Piacenza.  It starts at Trieste, goes to Piacenza.  And then when you get to around about Cremona, there's a number of islands, very swampy islands. And the river kind of kinks a little bit so it slows and it becomes a little bit narrower because of the swamps and that's not good enough to put a bridge on it but it's controllable so that you can put a pontoon bridge over the river so at certain times of the year you've got a huge bridge for trade for taking armies over and that's really the history of northern Italy is armies going one way or another. Cremona is that point right in the middle of Italy where you can get huge amounts of trade, commerce, anything can travel through and get over the pontoon bridge and of course that pontoon bridge doesn't exist anymore it's even difficult to see on maps because in maps people draw land features and stone buildings they don't  do disposable bridges. So right away from the Roman times, that's what Cremona stands for. If you go to Cremona, you'll see that there's all sorts of arguments, whether it's the highest tower in Italy, the highest tower in Europe, but the cathedral has this enormously high tower. And that's because actually from the top of the tower, people wanted to be able to see over the river to whatever was coming from the other side. There was a massive fortress in Cremona, towards the western edge. And one thing that you'll miss when you go there is that because of the way that the river's silted up, it's now about a mile.  Maybe two miles from the city walls. Linda Lespets Carlo Chiesa talks about cultural life in Cremona and how it was placed in the dutchy of Milan.  Carlo Chiesa Cremona was a large town in northern Italy in the plain, so in a very quiet and rich environment. But the problem was that, Cremona was never, the main center of a state. It was a large city in a rich area without a court  and without a university. So it was a quiet place, so to say. The noble families from Cremona, had a, usually a palace, a building in Milano.  So Milano was the important city and Cremona was just, an outskirt, so to say, there was no high cultural life in Cremona for many years, and at that time, that was the situation. So it was, I would say, a quiet place to live, but for the fact that sometimes it happened that armies arrived from one place to going to another and there were wars and riots and things like that. So, I think life was quite, easy in Cremona, but not, we must not, consider that as we see today, it was not safe. There was never a safe idea of life. That is the main difference in my opinion.  It was the seat of rich families, very rich families. It was a very rich environment, but since there was no court the cultural life was never as important as it was in  even smaller towns which had rulers and small courts, let's say Parma or Mantua or Piacenza  even. These are cities smaller, much smaller than Cremona and less rich than Cremona but situated just 40, 60, 80 kilometers away of  Cremona. But they had a richer  cultural life because there were kings or princes or  counts or some people who  took care of the court. Linda Lespets Cremona was a booming city on the rise. Around 35, 000 people lived there.  The size of it meant that merchants would not accumulate fortunes like those in Florence or Venice.  But what we do find is a healthy middle class. earning a good living for themselves.  To get an idea of the atmosphere, in the mid 1500s, 50 percent of people living in Cremona were artisans, 10 percent nobility, 20 percent were classed as just poor, and the rest worked for the others. Zooming into the artisan class of Cremona, we find that sixty percent of them worked in the thriving textile industry.  Cremona was known for its fustian, that's a heavy cotton fabric often used for men's clothing and padding.  The Cremonese fustian had dazzling colors and beautiful designs.  Cremona was making 100, 000 pieces of this fustian that was exported to Venice and beyond the Alps. This well connected city thrived through its manufacturing industry. Their success was an availability of raw materials and their ability to be able to process them. As in the textile industry, there was a sort of funnel of goods arriving from Venice, from the east and the rest of the known world. They would be shipped along the Po River in barges to Cremona where they would either be processed or go on to be sold in the rest of Europe. There were products arriving from the north, Germany and from the south, from Naples.  Merchandiser materials coming from all directions, converging on this one town, which made it a fantastic place to be an artisan.  All you desired was at your fingertips. The time we find ourselves in is the Renaissance.  Cremona is an intersection of trade, had not only physical goods, but ideas, and it is into this world we find our first violin maker. Andrea Amati,  a Renaissance man. Carlo  Chiesa.  Carlo Chiesa When Andrea Amati was born and when he grew up, he was working and he was an apprenticeship in a Renaissance workshop, meaning that his training  was as an artisan who was intended to be an artisan artist. Linda Lespets So the Renaissance, what was it exactly? I spoke to Dr. John Gagnier Dr John Gagne I'm John Gagne. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney, and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries.  What is the Renaissance?  Oh, right. Okay. Just in a nutshell. Yeah.  So the Renaissance, largely speaking, is an intellectual cultural movement. Based upon, well, you know, as you know, it's a French word, meaning the rebirth refers to any flourishing of some previously existing culture. I say this generally because, you know, there were renaissances before the, the famous one, the Italian renaissance, there was a Carolingian renaissance, there was a 12th century renaissance. But the one we're most familiar with is the, let's say the 15th century renaissance, which really got its start in the. 13th century, grew in the 14th century, maybe made most famous by Petrarch, who was a scholar and poet.  And then sort of exploded across Italy in the 15th century,  when  many culture makers and princes began to return to the inheritance of classical Roman antiquity to try to suck out of it the, you know, a platform for moving ahead in European history because they saw, they thought that the past had been so rich and so much had been lost that only by going back, could you find something to build the future with and what's maybe most notable about the 15th century renaissance is They really scraped all aspects of the, barrel, let's say, of ancient culture, so it was, intellectual, moral, philosophical, cartographic, scientific, musical, arithmetic, it was everything that the classical world had left. They really wanted to absorb and internalize. So in the 15th century in Lombardy, which is where Cremona is, there is a  court in Milan which also has a sort of satellite in the city of Pavia, the  second city of the duchy. The duchy of Lombardy is, you know, probably a few million people, one of the most industrious in northern Italy. The courts at Milan, the Ancestral Castle is at Pavia, that's also the university town. And then, the third city, let's say, although Pavia is very large, Cremona is often referred to as the second city of Lombardy, because it's also a city of industry. And so, The world in which Andrea Amati would have grown up. So there were maybe two aspects to that world. And one is the one I just described, which is a world of antique rebirth, which by the 16th century was in very full swing and had been internalized, even at levels below elite levels, thanks to things like the printing press, which had made access to knowledge more accessible. And then there's the political environment, which was more tumultuous because, the Duchy of Milan, or Lombardy was, contested territory for the first half of the century. So it was a war torn part of Italy. And so the world he would have grown up in would have been, extremely tumultuous because of shifting political regimes, especially in Cremona. Linda Lespets All the income taxes, I think it's income taxes, in Cremona just as a city, had as much income tax as all the other, towns. in the Milanese state combined, so economically it was quite important. John Gagne Yeah, and it sounds like one of their biggest industries was, textiles. It looks like mostly Fustian, which is a kind of cotton velvet, let's say. And a few other sort of middle range textiles. So they're not, what Cremona produces is not  fine textiles like silks and silk velvets and that kind of thing. Those are still produced elsewhere. In fact, in Milan, the city, put up regulations that prevented other cities, even within its own duchy, from, let's say, getting into the silk trade or silk production, which would have meant planting lots of mulberry trees that the silkworms could grow. That was not Cremona's specialty. They never really got into that. What they were surrounded by was flax and cotton. They had rich territory to grow that kind of crop and so they produced a kind of like hard wearing, sometimes called German style cloth, which they exported, very successfully into northern parts of Europe. Linda Lespets Basically it was a town that made a lot of its money through the textile trade. And they also talk a lot about the Moleskine, and I thought they were like... Actual little mole skins and I was imagining all these like farms with tiny little moles  and Emily the Fashion historian. She said no, it's a soft cotton. It's not actually a mole  So I'm like, where are they getting all these moles from? Because  it was a lot. John Gagne  Yeah, the renaissance mole farming was an intense industry. We won't get into right now, but no I'm joking yes, I mean, It's a city that, it sounds like, you know, Cremona's merchants were, very active on the regional and international scale. So it seems like more even than the Germans, there were Cremonese merchants active in Venice. So if you're thinking about like the, who would you, whose faces would you see most around Venice, which was of course like an international hub. The Cremonese community was extremely active in Venice, which gave them access to all kinds of, shipments coming from all over the world, really. And then there was an access because the city sits on a pilgrimage route known as the Via Franchesa, which runs from England down to Rome, there would have been a kind of like cross European access, route for traders, travellers, merchants to pass through the city as well. And, uh, so there's a constant passage of merchants from Cremona up into, you know, the Alps, then over into France and through, diagonally through France towards England. Linda Lespets In the center of the city of Cremona is the Piazza del Comune, or Town Square. A bustling hub of activity, this grand square was surrounded by some of the city's most impressive buildings, including the Palazzo Comunale, or Town Hall, with its tall arches and elegant columns. It was a symbol of the city's power and wealth, its political center. It's Loggia De Militi, it's military headquarters, and the cathedral, the religious heart of Cremona, with its impressive terrazzo bell tower standing proudly next to it.  Our violin maker Andrea Amati was born in 1505 and as a boy the cathedral was already almost 400 years old.  Rising up from the stone paved square, it is one of the most beautiful Romanesque cathedrals in Lombardy. On its white marble facade is a magnificent central rose window with a two story loggia adorned with stately statues. The sound of bells echoing through the city was a constant reminder of its importance, and at the moment it was undergoing a transformation. If the young Andrea Amati had wandered into the cathedral, he would have seen walls rising up held by giant stone pillars capped with gilded gold and intricate carvings. Weaving its way around all this was scaffolding. Lots of scaffolding. The painter Boccaccio Boccacino is painting colourful frescoes of the Epiphany and a cycle of the life of Mary in Christ. These paintings in the cathedral would continue throughout Andrea Amati's lifetime by a variety of artisans, and as the years passed he would see the church filled with vivid artworks bursting with life.  Sometimes even seemingly to spill out of the paintings themselves and into the church, thanks to the artist's use of trompe l'oeil and life sized paintings depicting biblical scenes. It is a truly impressive structure. Coming out of the cathedral and walking along a decorative portico, you cannot miss the Torazzo,  the highest tower in Italy, made of brick and rising well above the city. Its size and beauty were a source of pride for the people of Cremona.  From this tower, which is in fact the bell tower of the cathedral, a lookout could spot  approaching armed forces, and the people of the city were not being overcautious. Cremona had an unfortunate habit of being trampled by invading armies on a regular basis.  And yet, it was an exciting time to be alive. The world was changing in unstoppable ways. This was the modern era,  John Gagne. John Gagne  Okay, so, you know, obviously the modern era is contested and many people, accept that it's a  fiction of history, you know, when we become modern, but there are some compelling things that we recognize in terms of the transition from what we call the medieval to the modern. And one of the, say, most, enjoyable ones is a print. Made in the 16th century by the Dutch Flemish artist Jan Straat who went by Jan Stradanus, Johannes Stradanus in Latin, who's worked for the Venetian court.  And he produces a print called Nova Ruperta, which means New Discoveries. And it's nine items that he thought represented the modern world. And they were the Americas,  the magnetic compass, gunpowder, the printing press,  clockwork,  guayac wood, which was wood from Brazil that was used against syphilis,  distillation technology.  Silk cultivation and the stirrup and saddle  and those were some of these of course are not new to the 16th century Some of the like stirrups have been around since the deep Middle Ages and some of these of course were Asian technologies They were brought to Europe, you know, like printing or silk making and that kind of thing  Actually printing was individually  established in Europe, but all the rest of it gives you a sense of what people in 16th century thought made their age a new age So syphilis was a big thing  Yes, syphilis was completely contemporaneous with the Italian wars that we discussed earlier in terms of the breaking apart of local rule in Cremona. Syphilis, it's still disputed about whether syphilis was an ancient disease that had recurred,  or whether it was a completely new disease that Europeans pinned on the Americans. But, one of the first successful cures after mercury, which is of course a terrible cure because it also kills.  Even though it may feel like it's fixing the syphilis, was the guaiac wood from Brazil, which had curative properties. But maybe the overarching story is one about, an opening up of Europe to things that suggest going places or opening up to ideas whether it's about the magnetic compass and the discovery of the Americas or Travel learning new things to the printing press so it's let's say broadening of the mind of Americans of Europeans I'm sorry,  and that I think is a nice distillation Let's say of the idea of modernity in the 16th century is that these things are new discoveries that set Europe on a new path  And this modern era with all its new or revised discoveries and ideas would have influenced or been a part of Andrea Amati's life in Northern Italy. Linda Lespets Stories of strange and distant lands, cures of diseases, printing, the spread of learning, and music. Incredible clockwork mechanics and more give us a taste of the world he came from. Looking onto the Piazza del Comune, the centre square of Cremona, on a busy market day. You could run into locals and foreigners alike. Farmers, clergy, members of the civic community, artisans, nobility, peasants, and soldiers. There were always soldiers from somewhere. On campaign passing through the city. And of course merchants. Merchants of anything and everything, selling all sorts of goods imported into the city from one of the many trading routes leading there.  There were spices, herring, honey, oysters, fine wines, pepper, clothes, dyes, cloth, fake gold, iron, leather, paper, soap, hats, sugar, just to name a few of their wares. Although the city was under the control of the Venetian state, life was precarious. Safety was never assured, and wars between the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, and even neighboring states was a constant danger.  The people of Cremona lived in an ever present shadow of war.  John Gagne. John Gagne  Venice also had a claim on Cremona. So, part of it was that it was, Cremona was being tugged in three directions, the French claimed it, Cremona actually broke away from the Duchy of Lombardy in 1499 when the French took over and it gave itself to Venice for nine years or something and then the French captured it back. There was a lot of back and forth. For strategic reasons, obviously, it was a, for all the reasons we've described, it was a desirable city in terms of its productivity, it's revenue and that kind of thing.  Exactly. Yeah. Moles everywhere.  And so, uh, but there was also, interestingly, and maybe this is characteristic of Cremona, there was also a large sort of community of resistors to a lot of the foreign occupation. There's one great story about. In the 1520s, as the Cremonese were trying to escape from French oversight that 500 rebels against the French entered the city disguised as peasant grocers to lead a revolt from within. So that's the kind of thing that's going on all the time is an attempt to pull the city in one direction or another, often by the residents themselves that are trying to fight against whoever is in control. Yeah, it's, it's tremendously, um, tumultuous until basically the, French totally withdraw. And it's, as I said, Cremona is the last city other than Milan that the French withdraw from. And so it was really kind of like a war zone. In the story of the 16th century though, if I can tell big stories for a second, is one of recovery. So through the, let's say up to 1600, uh, there's a lot of recovery going on, economic recovery, you know, a post war boom of some sorts where the city is reestablishing its earlier successes. And then after 1600, there's a slide downwards that comes as a result of a number of things, including the 1630 plague and the 30 years war, which runs from 1618 to 1648. And that really, Sets most of Italy on an economic decline that's, that it never really recovers from, you know, until the 19th century. Linda Lespets One day when Andrea was seven years old, news came of the brutal sacking of the city of Brescia by the French. I speak about this in the very first episode of the Violin Chronicles. Brescia was only 60 kilometres away and also part of the Venetian state. Would Cremona be next?  Word came that Bergamo had paid the French 60, 000 ducats to avoid a similar fate.  Cremona was not in danger, just now. But after some complicated manoeuvring, the city was now being ruled by the Dukes of Milan, the Sforzas. Battles were being fought and armies were passing through the city, again. But life went on, and Andrea would grow up in this time of uncertainty, with continual war looming on the horizon. A horizon that could be seen from the top of that really tall bell tower. We were just talking about the terrazzo. At around the age of 14, Andrea would have started learning his trade. He was most likely apprenticed to an instrument maker, or learnt from his father, perfecting his skills and honing his craftsmanship.  In the Amati household, after several years, Andrea would have finished his apprenticeship, become a craftsman, and continue to work under a master for many years. He would live through the turbulent years in his town until he reached the age of 30, when the city changed hands once again and was now controlled by the Spanish.  The irony of this war was that the Spanish created relative peace and stability by investing in local infrastructure and injecting money into the region. They absolutely wanted to keep other powers out, and ended up creating a bubble of stability for the area.  John Gagne explains how the Spanish came to rule Lombardy and Cremona.  John Gagne I should say that the whole century was a bit messy, or the first half of the century was very messy.  The first thing to say is that the Spanish and the French had been, in Italy for centuries. So, the Spanish had ruled, or the House of  Aragon had ruled the Kingdom of Naples on and off with the Angevins of France  since the 13th century. So, in the south of Italy, there had been a kind of give and take between France and Spain over the rulership of, Italy's largest kingdom since the Middle Ages and this had been going on even earlier in Sicily. So, there's kind of an upward movement of this contest between the crown of France and the crowns of Spain that then breaks out at the end of the 15th century when both the Spanish and the French try to gain more territory in Italy. The fulcrum for their dispute, well, it starts actually in, not surprisingly in Naples, but the Spanish managed to keep Naples after some tumults between the 1490s and the 1510s. But in the north the French succeed for the first 30 years of the century. So the French establish, they take over the entire duchy of Lombardy. They kick out the Milanese dukes, more or less. I mean, there's a lot of fighting. They come back three times. So there's a lot of in and out of regimes.  So the French succeed and in fact, Cremona is in French hands for the longest of any city in the Duchy and is one of the most fought over. There's a lot of violence in Cremona through the 1530s, and there's a lot of tension with the French occupiers through that period as well. In fact, there's a great chronicle in the civic library of Cremona that I've looked at, which is vivid that just in describing the suffering of the people of Cremona in the first 30 years of the 16th century. Then the Spanish crown manages to kick the French out and they say they claim the duchy of Lombardy for themselves, which in truth they did have some claim to because the Spanish crown became soldered to the Holy Roman Empire.  In 1500, when the little prince, Charles V, inherited both the Spanish crown and the Holy Roman Empire. So in one person, you had that trans European claim on a lot of territories. So it's largely thanks to the inheritance of Charles V that he could lay claim to the Duchy of Milan. which finally came into his hands in 1535 when the last of the native Dukes died. And then, it basically remained in Spanish hands until the 18th century. Much of Italy was under Spanish rule of some kind, until the 18th century. And maybe the key, the last thing to say here about how Cremona became Spanish was that, Emperor Charles V retired. He handed, he broke up this unified dominion over much of Europe and handed off different parts to different people. His son became, King Philip II of Spain. And in the 1540s, the late 1540s, King Philip established personal rule over the Duchy of Milan. And in that case, you know, he sent a lot more, governors to Italy to take over and make sure that his own orders were being enforced. So by 1550, let's say, by the time Andrea Amati is an adult man, the government he's working under is run by a Spaniard. Although the, let's say, the city of Cremona is still being overseen by a largely Italian group of magistrates under the rulership of these Spanish representatives.  The Spanish monarchy took over from the Sforza Lodge in 1535 and would retain power that would last for the next 200 years or thereabouts. Linda Lespets This same period of Spanish occupation would coincide with a golden period of violin making in Cremona and would englobe the lives of the four next generations of our Amati family. This brings us to the end of the first episode in this series on Andrea Amati.  The picture we have of Cremona in the early 16th century is of a busy commercial hub full of artisans, not particularly many instrument makers, yet things are about to change on that front. Despite the city being battered by wars, the people are particularly resilient, if somewhat warlike, and as you will see in the upcoming episodes, they will have to face even greater odds to survive and thrive. All the while creating some of the most beautiful instruments we have surviving today.   I'd like to thank my guests, Carlo Chiesa,  Benjamin Hebbert, and Dr. John Gagne for sharing their knowledge with us today.  Thank you so much for listening to this podcast and I'll catch you next time on The Violin Chronicles. Whether you're a seasoned musician, a lover of classical music, or simply curious about the art of violin-making, “The Violin Chronicles” is the perfect podcast for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of one of the greatest craftspeople in history. Join us as we explore the life, work, and legacy of Andrea Amati, and discover the secrets of his enduring genius. The music you have heard in this episode is by Unfamiliar faces – All good folks, Bloom - Roo Walker, Getting to the bottom of it –, Fernweh Goldfish, Le Magicien- Giulio Fazio, Industrial music box-Kevin Macleod, The penny drops- Ben Mcelroy, Gregorian chant- Kevin Macleod, Make believe-Giuolio Fazio, Casuarinas- Dan Barracuda, ACO live in the studio Baccherini

After Leo X's sudden death, the Medici are briefly out of power in the papacy. In the meantime, Emperor Charles V changes the landscape of European politics by getting elected as Holy Roman Emperor, and the fate of the Medici family is put in the hands of an orphaned, illegitimate son. Check out images, maps, genealogies, and more at medicipodcast.com. Support me on Patreon

Full Text of ReadingsNineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 117All podcast readings are produced by the USCCB and are from the Catholic Lectionary, based on the New American Bible and approved for use in the United States _______________________________________The Saint of the day is Saint CajetanLike most of us, Cajetan seemed headed for an “ordinary” life—first as a lawyer, then as a priest engaged in the work of the Roman Curia. His life took a characteristic turn when he joined the Oratory of Divine Love in Rome, a group devoted to piety and charity, shortly after his ordination at 36. When he was 42 he founded a hospital for incurables at Venice. At Vicenza, he joined a “disreputable” religious community that consisted only of men of the lowest stations of life—and was roundly censured by his friends, who thought his action was a reflection on his family. He sought out the sick and poor of the town and served them. The greatest need of the time was the reformation of a Church that was “sick in head and members.” Cajetan and three friends decided that the best road to reformation lay in reviving the spirit and zeal of the clergy. Together they founded a congregation known as the Theatines—from Teate [Chieti] where their first superior-bishop had his see. One of the friends later became Pope Paul IV. They managed to escape to Venice after their house in Rome was wrecked when Emperor Charles V's troops sacked Rome in 1527. The Theatines were outstanding among the Catholic reform movements that took shape before the Protestant Reformation. Cajetan founded a monte de pieta—“mountain or fund of piety”—in Naples, one of many charitable, nonprofit credit organizations that lent money on the security of pawned objects. The purpose was to help the poor and protect them against usurers. Cajetan's little organization ultimately became the Bank of Naples, with great changes in policy. Reflection If Vatican II had been summarily stopped after its first session in 1962, many Catholics would have felt that a great blow had been dealt to the growth of the Church. Cajetan had the same feeling about the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563. But as he said, God is the same in Naples as in Venice, with or without Trent or Vatican II. We open ourselves to God's power in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and God's will is done. God's standards of success differ from ours. Saint of the Day, Copyright Franciscan Media

Part 24 Reformation 1 - Martin Luther You may remember that in our series we looked briefly a the split between the Eastern and Western churches. Today we come to a greater split! A split within the Roman Catholic church – the beginnings of the Protestant church! The main person who will look at today is Martin Luther – one of the very giants of church history! . Martin Luther (1483-1546) - Professor of Biblical Studies at Wittenburg University in Germany. Luther tried to find god as an Augustinian monk but he was unable to come to terms with God's righteous demands. He eventually realised that in order to satisfy God's righteous demands, that he could do nothing of his own to fulfil them. He came to see that justification before Almighty God was by faith alone, through grace alone, which was a gift of God. Included in the aftermath of this discovery, were these events! . 95 Theses - statements against indulgences nailed to the castle church door at Wittenburg on 31st October 1517. He rapidly gained a following in Germany, and was aided by the printing press. 1519 - denied the supremacy and infallibility of the Pope and Church. 1520 - excommunicated by Pope Leo X 1521 - Diet of Worms. Luther was outlawed by Emperor Charles V of Spain. He was hidden by friends for 8 months, during which he translated the N.T. into German. 1528 - Diet of Spruger. Each German state allowed to follow the religion of its reigning prince. 1529 - Diet of Speyer. Lutheran states to remain Lutheran and Catholic states to remain Catholic, not allowed to change. Evangelical princes protested at restriction and the Protestant was given to this movement. 1530 - Diet of Augsburg. Protestants submitted statement of belief witch was rejected, but became the basis of Lutheran doctrine. 1547 - War broke out between Catholic and Protestant. This war was won by the Catholics, but Protestantism was finally recognised legally in 1552. Three main truths to come out of the Reformation. Final authority of God's Word. Justification by faith, a gift of God's grace. The priesthood of all believers. . However it should be noted that, wrongly or rightly, Luther still accepted as truth Infant baptism as necessary for salvation. Consubstantiation - a 'real presence' of Christ's body with bread and wine. . Lutheranism quickly spread from Germany to Denmark, Norway and Sweden. . That's it for this time! Next time in our series HAHA, we will continue looking at the great Reformers of the church! Tap or click here to save this as an audio mp3 file

It's time for a deep dive into the history surrounding the Augsburg Confession! In this episode, hear answers to questions like: Why did Emperor Charles V calling for a general assembly at Augsburg in 1530? How much of the significance of the Augsburg Confession in its day was political and how much was religious or theological? Why didn't Luther write the Augsburg Confession? What are the various articles that are included in the Augsburg Confession, and why they the ones the Lutherans choose to address? Why did the Lutheran confessors find it necessary to draft a reply defending the Augsburg Confession, called the Apology of the Augsburg Confession? Dr. Jack Kilcrease joins host Rev. Sean Smith to discuss the history of the Augsburg Confession. Dr. Kilcrease is associate professor of Historical & Systematic Theology for the Institute of Lutheran Theology and member of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Grand Rapids, MI.

I am joined by friend of the show, Dr Lauren Mackay, to discuss Eustace Chapuys, whose fascinating life took him from studying near the Holy Shroud of Turin to the heart of the Habsburg and Tudor courts on the eve of the Reformation. He wrote in cyphers, spied for an emperor, and stood witness to rebellions, miscarriages of justice, and diplomatic scandals. Did this erudite clergyman really become Anne Boleyn's mortal enemy, as has been claimed? And how did he become a confidant of Emperor Charles V and Katherine of Aragon's last - and perhaps most loyal - friend?

How does the Reformation of 500 years ago help me today? A look at one of the most important statements of faith from the Reformation era will guide us. We will hear from President Mike Newman, of the Texas District of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, as he helps us apply the Augsburg Confession to your life in Christ, (specifically Articles 4 and 5). About a dozen years after Martin Luther nailed his "95 Theses" against corruption to the Castle Church door (October 31, 1517, in Wittenberg, Germany), a powerful presentation was made to Emperor Charles V.

Full Text of ReadingsSaturday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time Lectionary: 412All podcast readings are produced by the USCCB and are from the Catholic Lectionary, based on the New American Bible and approved for use in the United States _______________________________________The Saint of the day is Saint CajetanLike most of us, Cajetan seemed headed for an “ordinary” life—first as a lawyer, then as a priest engaged in the work of the Roman Curia. His life took a characteristic turn when he joined the Oratory of Divine Love in Rome, a group devoted to piety and charity, shortly after his ordination at 36. When he was 42 he founded a hospital for incurables at Venice. At Vicenza, he joined a “disreputable” religious community that consisted only of men of the lowest stations of life—and was roundly censured by his friends, who thought his action was a reflection on his family. He sought out the sick and poor of the town and served them. The greatest need of the time was the reformation of a Church that was “sick in head and members.” Cajetan and three friends decided that the best road to reformation lay in reviving the spirit and zeal of the clergy. Together they founded a congregation known as the Theatines—from Teate [Chieti] where their first superior-bishop had his see. One of the friends later became Pope Paul IV. They managed to escape to Venice after their house in Rome was wrecked when Emperor Charles V's troops sacked Rome in 1527. The Theatines were outstanding among the Catholic reform movements that took shape before the Protestant Reformation. Cajetan founded a monte de pieta—“mountain or fund of piety”—in Naples, one of many charitable, nonprofit credit organizations that lent money on the security of pawned objects. The purpose was to help the poor and protect them against usurers. Cajetan's little organization ultimately became the Bank of Naples, with great changes in policy. Reflection If Vatican II had been summarily stopped after its first session in 1962, many Catholics would have felt that a great blow had been dealt to the growth of the Church. Cajetan had the same feeling about the Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563. But as he said, God is the same in Naples as in Venice, with or without Trent or Vatican II. We open ourselves to God's power in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and God's will is done. God's standards of success differ from ours. Saint of the Day Copyright Franciscan Media

Readings* Psalm 119:49–56* Psalm 79* Exodus 32:15–35* Luke 6:39–49* Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord, Art. VII ¶¶ 73–76CommemorationToday we celebrate the 500th anniversary of Luther before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. It was at the Diet of Worms that Luther issued his most famous statement: "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen." His full closing remarks (in English):> Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Amen.Although the Reformation began with the 95 Theses in 1517, it was at Worms that the true break with Rome occurred, that the proverbial Rubicon was crossed. We commemorate Luther's brave stand because God used Luther to rescue the Gospel from its long Babylonian captivity. May we never forget the treasures entrusted to our care.ReaderCorey J. MahlerCopyright NoticesUnless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the Lutheran Confessions are from Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, copyright © 2005, 2006 by Concordia Publishing House. Used by permission. All rights reserved. To purchase a copy of Concordia, call 800-325-3040.Support the show (https://confident.faith/donate/)

The main events of the Diet of Worms relating to Luther took place from 16 to 18 April 1521. This year marks the 500thanniversary of the Diet of Worms, and on this occasion, we welcome Dr. Herman Selderhuis to rehearse the events of the diet and share his thoughts about its enduring significance for the church. The Diet of Worms of 1521 was a formal deliberative assembly of the Holy Roman Empire called by Emperor Charles V and conducted in the city of Worms. Martin Luther was summoned to the Diet in order to renounce or reaffirm his views in response to a Papal bull of Pope Leo X. Luther defended these views and refused to recant them. At the end of the Diet, the Emperor issued the Edict of Worms, condemning Luther and banning citizensfrom propagating his ideas. Dr. Herman Selderhuis is Professor of church history and church polity at the Theological University of Apeldoorn and the President of The International Congress on Calvin Research.

In an episode notable perhaps only for the length of its title, Men in Charge take you back into the "Habsburg-punk" era of the Schmalkaldic League, 16th century Europe's last, best hope against the machinations of the Emperor Charles V. This episode, "Genesis of the Complutensian Bible," introduces a walking, talking book of holy scripture, a miniaturized inventor of the European printing press, King Gustavus Vasa's invention, "the Macerator," and intelligent, hungry vegetables--the Huzhon Frisee! Or maybe you've been relying on these episode descriptions and little too much and we're lying. You'll find out.

Catherine of Aragon was the first wife of King Henry VIII, the mother of Queen Mary I and the aunt of Emperor Charles V, but there are lots more interesting facts about this Tudor woman.   In this talk, historian Claire Ridgway shares 16 interesting facts about this Tudor queen consort. How many of them do you already know?   Here is the link to the video Claire mentioned, “September 9 - Catherine of Aragon and the mystery of James IV's body” - https://youtu.be/scoxeEPvLk4

Maren begins reading A Flemish Flame, which she wrote during a production of Verdi's Don Carlo. She also talks a bit about unfinished artwork, procrastination, and briefly about the sociopolitical landscape in the USA right now.The music played during this episode:Excerpts from Giuseppe Verdi's String Quartet in E minorFollow Maren...on Instagram: @supermarenon Facebook: https://facebook.com/maren.montalbanoSign up for the Bodice Ripper Project newsletter and get exclusive behind-the-scenes content: http://www.bodiceripperproject.com/Purchase Maren's debut book, Pandemic Passion: A COVID-19 novella on Kindle: https://amzn.to/3guGck0Transcript and Show Notes: http://www.bodiceripperproject.com/e014/

When Martin Luther received an invitation to defend his case before Emperor Charles V, he knew his defense of the gospel might result in his demise. On this day 500 years ago, Luther reads a second imperial letter that has arrived -- and his heart sinks. A donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Donate: https://gift.ligonier.org/1438/luther-in-real-time If this podcast has been a blessing to you, try these other podcasts from Ligonier: Renewing Your Mind: https://renewingyourmind.org/ 5 Minutes in Church History: https://www.5minutesinchurchhistory.com/ Ask Ligonier: https://ask.ligonier.org/podcast Open Book: https://openbookpodcast.com/ Simply Put: https://simplyputpodcast.com/ The Westminster Shorter Catechism with Sinclair Ferguson: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/westminster-shorter-catechism/

1520 is a year of suspense. The pope renews his calls for Luther to be silenced. Luther publishes some of his most significant books in his lifetime. Emperor Charles V is crowned at Aachen. This episode reviews Luther’s major literary works. We also follow the activities of Rome that lead up Luther’s excommunication. Beer Break […]

Is the whole church in error, except for Martin Luther? Standing alone on the authority of Scripture, Luther asks Christian dukes and princes to take their stand with him against the pope. Today, go back to November 4, 1520, to hear how Emperor Charles V responds to Luther's appeal. A donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Donate: https://gift.ligonier.org/1438/luther-in-real-time If this podcast has been a blessing to you, try these other podcasts from Ligonier: Renewing Your Mind: https://renewingyourmind.org/ 5 Minutes in Church History: https://www.5minutesinchurchhistory.com/ Ask Ligonier: https://ask.ligonier.org/podcast Open Book: https://openbookpodcast.com/ Simply Put: https://simplyputpodcast.com/ The Westminster Shorter Catechism with Sinclair Ferguson: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/westminster-shorter-catechism/

On this day in Tudor history, 3rd October 1536, imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote to Emperor Charles V informing him that Jane Seymour’s coronation was being postponed. Several dates for Henry VIII's third wife's coronation are mentioned in the contemporary sources, but they all passed by without the coronation taking place, and building work on Westminster Palace in preparation for the coronation came to a halt. Why wasn't Jane Seymour crowned when her predecessor, Anne Boleyn, had been given a lavish coronation? Find out more about what happened in 1536 and 1537 in today's talk from historian Claire Ridgway.  Also on this day in Tudor history, 3rd October 1518, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, sang a mass to Henry VIII and the French ambassadors at St Paul's Cathedral in celebration of a treaty between England and France. This mass wasn't the only celebration, there was also a banquet and a lavish masque of lords and ladies dressed beautifully and disguised with masking hoods. And the masque included some well-known courtiers, people like Sir Francis Bryan and Bessie Blount, the King's mistress. Hear a contemporary description of that masque in last year’s video - https://youtu.be/O1KNCNb5O7c 

This day in Tudor history, 7th March 1556, was one of the days on which the Great Comet, or the Comet of Charles V, was seen and recorded by Paul Fabricius, mathematician and physician at the court of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Find out all about the Great Comet of 1556, what it looked like and how Emperor Charles V saw it as an ominous portent in today's talk from Claire Ridgway, author of "On This Day in Tudor History". You can see this podcast as a video at the following link:https://youtu.be/acdhc-kzXnM Also on this day in Tudor history, 7th March 1530, Pope Clement VII threatened to excommunicate Henry VIII if he married again. Find out all about that in last year’s video - https://youtu.be/Y-N3cSyx4dA 

On this day in Tudor history, 2nd January 1536, imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, visited his good friend, Catherine of Aragon, first wife of King Henry VIII and a woman who was now officially called the Dowager Princess of Wales. Catherine was seriously ill, in fact she was dying, and this would be the last time that Chapuys saw her. Find out from Chapuys' own account, read by Claire Ridgway, Tudor history author, what happened in the four days he spent with Catherine of Aragon. You can read Chapuys' full letter to Emperor Charles V at https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/spain/vol5/no2/pp1-10  - document number 3. You can see this podcast as a video at the following link:https://youtu.be/XptvWNA3RBo Also on this day in Tudor history, 2nd January 1492, the Moors surrendered Granada to the forces of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. Find out more about this in last year's talk - https://youtu.be/YkTKaX4tpMA You can find Claire at:https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com https://www.tudorsociety.comhttps://www.facebook.com/theanneboleynfiles/https://www.facebook.com/tudorsociety/https://twitter.com/AnneBoleynFiles https://twitter.com/thetudorsociety https://www.instagram.com/tudor.society/ https://www.instagram.com/anneboleynfiles/ 

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world's first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world's leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles's achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles's reign and views the world through the emperor's own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House's International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world's first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world's leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles's achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles's reign and views the world through the emperor's own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House's International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world's first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world's leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles's achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles's reign and views the world through the emperor's own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House's International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack's study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe's new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack's study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe's new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack's study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe's new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The kingdoms of England and Spain are allies during the reign of Mary I of England and her husband Philip Habsburg, son of Emperor Charles V. Mary, however, dies childless and is succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, a Protestant. Meanwhile Mary Queen of Scots is briefly Queen of France, but on the death of her husband returns to Scotland, causing a dilemma for Queen Elizabeth. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this day in 1530, June the 25th, the Evangelical theologians of Wittenberg led by Philip Melanchthon presented their confession of faith and the Gospel to Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg.

The doctrine of the lesser magistrates declares that when the superior or higher civil authority makes an unjust/immoral law or decree, the lesser or lower ranking civil authority has both the right and duty to refuse obedience to that superior authority. Lloyd and Pastor Bennett discuss how this 500-year-old doctrine applies to us today. Use these Links to Support Armed Lutheran Radio Armed Lutheran Radio is a listener-supported podcast. If you value the information and entertainment we provide, consider supporting the show by joining our membership site, or shopping at your favorite online stores using the links below. Join the Reformation Gun Club! RadioPublic Shop at Amazon. Shop at Shop at GunMagWarehouse. Shop Firearms and accessories at Palmetto State Armory. Shop at ShootSteel.com Shop for everyday cigar deals at Cigar Page Get Regular Refills Coffee Subscriptions at the Dunkin' Donuts Shop! Join the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network Clinging to God and Guns Luther wrote in March 1530 that no christian should set himself against the government even if the government acts unjustly. A Christian ought to suffer injustice and rather than resist because even if the government is tyrannical, that in no way removes our obligation as citizens to be obedient. But six months later, in his letter "A Warning to His Dear German People," [LW 47, 11-55] Luther’s view on this subject changed as the threat of military action by the Holy Roman Emperor loomed on the horizon. In 1545, just months after Luther's death, Emperor Charles V prepares for war against the Lutherans, who launch an ill-fated pre-emptive strike. Before long, the Lutheran princes are in submission, dead, or in prison and the Augsburg Interim re-imposes Roman worship on the German people. As the armies of the Emperor close in on the City of Magdeburg, the pastors there write the Magdeburg Confession, expanding on Luther's 1530 letter and laying out the Biblical case for armed resistance to tyranny -- the Lesser Magistrates Doctrine. 500 years later in the United States we see lesser magistrates refusing to uphold or enforce laws from gun control to immigration enforcement. Links of Interest The Magdeburg Confession: 13th of April 1550 AD Tyranny and Resistance: The Magdeburg Confession and the Lutheran Tradition Luther's Works, Volume 47: Christian in Society IV Devotion for the Week The people of Israel contended with the Lord in the wilderness (Ex. 17:1–7). They were dissatisfied with His provision. In the same way, the first laborers in the vineyard complained against the landowner for the wage he provided them (Matt. 20:1–16). They charged him with being unfair, but in reality he was being generous. For the Lord does not wish to deal with us on the basis of what we deserve but on the basis of His abounding grace in Christ. The first—those who rely on their own merits—will be last. “For they were overthrown in the wilderness” (1 Cor. 10:5). But the last, those who rely on Christ, will be first. For Christ is the Rock (1 Cor. 9:24–10:5). He is the One who was struck and from whose side blood and water flowed that we may be cleansed of our sin. Get in Touch Visit our Feedback Page and leave us a message! Please tell your friends about us, leave an iTunes review, and like us on Facebook Join our Facebook group, Fans of Armed Lutheran Radio Subscribe to us and follow us on Youtube Follow us on Twitter @armedlutheran And search for us on Instagram Check Out More at Our Website Subscribe and Listen Apple Podcasts / iTunes RadioPublic Google Podcasts TuneIn iHeartRadio Stitcher Spotify CastBox.fm Overcast Our Closing Theme A rockin' rendition of A Mighty Fortress is Our God, performed just for Armed Lutheran Radio by Kenny Gates. Keep Shooting, Keep Praying, We'll Talk to you Next time!  

Episode 3: St. Thomas More - Show Notes Corrections or clarifications on a few point are provided below in the Summary. Also, since this discussion went long, we have divided the recording into three parts, separated by short breaks: • Part 1: Early Life (beginning to 35:40) • Part 2: Beginning of the Reformation (35:40 to 57:06) • Part 3: Martyrdom (57:06 to end) *Special Thank You to Paul Spring for allowing us to use his song "Itasca" from the album Borderline EP (2014)! Brief Chronology: • 1478 - Birth of Thomas More • 1485 - Battle of Bosworth Field (end of Plantagenet and beginning of Tudor dynasty) • 1490-92 - More is a page in Cardinal Morton's household • 1504 or 1505 - Marriage to first wife, Jane Colt, mother to More's four biological children • 1511- Death of Jane Colt and marriage to second wife, Alice Middleton • 1515 - More writes Utopia (published 1516) • 1517 - Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses (starting Protestant Reformation) • 1525 - Peasants' War in Germany; William Tyndale translates New Testament • 1527 - Rome sacked by Charles V's army • 1529-1532 - More is made Lord Chancellor • 1533 - Marriage of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn • 1534 - More is imprisoned in Tower of London • 1535 - Trial and execution of Thomas More • 1935 - Canonization by Pope Pius XI Episode Summary: This was a long conversation, but we hope you get a lot out of good information from it! Thomas More was (probably) born February 7, 1478 in London, England. His childhood was a unstable time for England: the final years of a civil war between rival branches of the ruling Plantagenet family called the Wars of the Roses. Thomas More would become an important official under the new Tudor dynasty, especially under Henry VII's son Henry VIII. More studied grammar, logic and rhetoric from a young age and was eventually sent to Oxford and the Inns of Court to study law. He also spent some years as part of the household of Cardinal Morton, which may have helped shape him spiritually. More's family came from a middle class background: his grandfathers were a baker and brewer. His father John More was sent to study law and eventually became a judge. However, the family seems to have been targeted by Henry VII after a young Thomas More opposed a tax in parliament that the king wanted. (+ Correction to the episode: the tax was related to posthumous knighting of Arthur and a dowry for Princess Margaret's marriage to the king of Scotland). After Henry VII's death, More found favor with his son Henry VIII and eventually More rose to the high position of Lord Chancellor, technically the highest judicial post, but which also included other duties at the king's discretion. Both before and after becoming Lord Chancellor, More was responsible for suppressing what were then considered heresies (Protestantism), a fact which has made him controversial for modern scholars. The Reformation is traditionally reckoned to have begun with Martin Luther posting his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517. The reformation spread to the rest of Europe and started to take on new forms. In England it was viewed as a dangerous sequel to the Lollard movement. Henry VIII's government, fearing sedition and social chaos, violently suppressed the Protestants. More was the highest lay official in this government and vehemently opposed to the Protestants' attack on tradition. Six people were executed for heresy during his time in office and many protestant books were seized and burned. During this period More wrote books against the ideas of Luther and Tyndale, who had ironically been influenced by the ideas of More's friend Erasmus. (+ Another correction to the episode: the Bible text that Zwingli and other reformers liked, which Jake butchers is," The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing." - John 6:63). Nonetheless, More was moderate in his response to his son-in-law William Roper's temporary conversion to Protestantism and he may have sensed that the Reformation would eventually gain the upper hand. He privately confided to Roper, "'And yet, son Roper, I pray God,' said he, 'that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day that we gladly would wish to be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so they would be content to let us have ours quietly to ourselves." (Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More, Knight, p. 18). Ironically, More became a victim of the same government he had served. More took over office as Lord Chancellor, following the fall of Cardinal Wolsey from royal favor, in a turbulent time. While central Europe was dividing along sectarian lines, Italy was fought over by France and the Holy Roman Empire. England shifted first from an alliance with the Holy Roman Empire (championed by Wolsey) to an alliance with France when it became clear that Emperor Charles V would not support Henry VIII's claim to be king of France. However, despite Wolsey's efforts, Pope Clement VII would not approve Henry VIII divorce from Queen Catherine, Charles V's aunt. Clement VII was apparently fearful after Charles V's troops sacked Rome in 1527, but he also may have realized that the annulment could have tarnished his spiritual and moral authority, which was already in jeopardy due to the Reformation (Richard Marius, Thomas More, p. 214-15). In his position of power, More's beliefs eventually became impossible to reconcile with King Henry VIII's objectives of divorcing Catherine and declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England. More was allowed to resign, but refused to publicly support the marriage or the new laws enacting the English Reformation. Anne Boleyn and the royal secretary Thomas Cromwell, both favoring reformation, increasingly targeted More. After refusing an oath to support the marriage to Anne Boleyn and succession, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. After over a year of confinement, during which he continued to refuse to take the oath or to say directly why he would not, he was finally put on trial for treason. When he was executed on July 6, 1535, More told onlookers "to pray for him, and to bear witness with him that he should now suffer death in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church." (Roper, p. 50) Four hundred years later, in 1935, Pope Pius XI declared Thomas More a saint along with his fellow martyr St. John Fisher. Even if Thomas More had not risen to high office or been martyred for his faith, he would still be famous today as a renaissance humanist and writer. He left behind political works such as Utopia as well as religious and philosophical writings, such as the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. He was friends with the famous humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who remembered More after his execution as follows: " [...] Thomas More, who was the chief magistrate of his country, whose heart was whiter than snow, a genius such as England never had before, nor ever will have again, a country by no means lacking genius" (Erasmus’ Dedicatory Preface to Ecclesiastes, August 1535, online at The Center for Thomas More Studies). Primary Sources: * Utopia by Thomas More, ed. by Edward Surtz, S.J . (Yale Univ. Press, 1964). * Final Letters by Thomas More, ed. by Alvaro de Silva (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2000) * The Life of Sir Thomas More, Knight by William Roper - Citations above are to the edition published in Lives of Saint Thomas More, ed. by E.E. Nichols (J.M.Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1963). This is a short memoir of More by his son-in-law William Roper. * The Center for Thomas More Studies: https://thomasmorestudies.org/index.html Secondary Sources: * Thomas More: A Biography by Richard Marius (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). * The King's Good Servant but God's First: The Life and Writings of St. Thomas More by James Monti (Ignatius Press, 1997). * The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. by George Logan (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011) - Especially recommended is the essay, "Thomas More and the heretics: statesman or fanatic?" by Richard Rex . * Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants, and the Conversion of England by Eamon Duffy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017). * The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid McCulloch (Penguin, 2004). Movies: * A Man of All Seasons (1967) - Highly recommended award-winning movie based on the play by Robert Bolt. (source for the quote, "This isn't Spain, this is England!" featured in the episode). Image Credit: "Thomas More and His Family" (1592) - Rowland Lockey [Public domain]

The Ottoman Turks and their Barbary Pirate allies fight against Emperor Charles V and Italians for influence in the Mediterranean but form an alliance of convenience with France which shocks Christendom. Meanwhile there is court intrigue in Constantinople centred around the sultan's harem. And Charles V decides to abdicate after a long reign (pictured: a tapestry of the abdication ceremony) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Barbary Pirates fill a political vacuum in North Africa in the 1400's. Then in the 1500's, after the capture of Cairo, the Ottomans expand into the Mediterranean. Emperor Charles V captures the strategic city of Tunis in 1535 but Christendom soon after faces numerous setbacks against the Turks, most notably defeat the naval Battle of Preveza 1538 (pictured) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Thanking God for the Reformation Part 2 - Reformation Is Born   The Church before the Reformation G’day and welcome to our series, Thanking God for the Reformation, where we are looking at and celebrating that momentous event in history, and including in that, Church history. These are extracts from the book “Heroes And Heretics Abound” available on Amazon sites. Change is gathering apace and we now see a great split. A split from within the Roman Catholic Church – the beginnings of the Protestant Church. Our main person we will look at is Martin Luther – one of the very giants of Church history.Martin Luther (1483-1546) Luther was the Professor of Biblical Studies at Wittenberg University in Germany. Luther tried to find God as an Augustinian monk but he was unable to come to terms with God's righteous demands. He eventually realised through prayer and reading the Scriptures, that he could do nothing of his own to fulfil or satisfy God’s righteous demands upon him. He came to see that justification before Almighty God was by faith alone, through grace alone, which was a gift of God. Included in the aftermath of this discovery, were these key dates and events as the Reformation of Christianity and the Church gathered pace. 1517: Luther’s 95 Theses, statements against indulgences were nailed to the Castle Church door at Wittenberg on 31st October He rapidly gained a following in Germany, and was aided by the advent of the printing press. 1519: Luther publicly denied the supremacy and infallibility of the Pope and Church. 1520: Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X 1521: Diet Of Worms. Luther was outlawed by Emperor Charles V of Spain. He was hidden by friends for 8 months, during which he translated the New Testament into German. 1528: Diet Of Spruger. A change in German law allowed each German State to follow the religion of its reigning prince. Once announced, change of religion was forbidden. 1529: Diet Of Speyer. Decides the Lutheran states were to remain Lutheran and the Catholic states to remain Catholic; not allowed to change. Evangelical princes protested at the restriction and the name Protestant was given to this movement. 1530: Diet Of Augsburg. Protestants submitted a statement of belief which was rejected, but became the basis of Lutheran doctrine. 1547: war broke out between Catholic and Protestant states. This war was won by the Catholics, but Protestantism was finally recognised legally in 1552.Core Truths There were 3 main truths resulting from this Reformation which we hold fast today in general in large parts of the Church, particularly Protestantism: Final authority of God's Word Justification by faith, a gift of God's grace The priesthood of all believers. Lutheranism spread from Germany to Denmark, Norway and Sweden. However, having said that, it should be noted that, wrongly or rightly, Luther still accepted as truth the following theological standpoints: Consubstantiation - a 'real presence' of Christ's body with bread and wine though not that the bread actually became His body. As opposed to transubstantiation held by the Roman Catholic Church which says the bread and wine becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus. Infant baptism as necessary for salvation. We may get the idea that this man was dour and humourless. However, he maintained a sense of humour and obviously like laughing. An indication of that, is in this quote attributed to him: “If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.” Tomorrow in part 3, we will look at Luther's 95 Theses...   Click or Tap here to listen to or save this as an audio mp3 file ~ You can now purchase our Partakers books! Please do click or tap here to visit our Amazon site! Click or tap on the appropriate link below to subscribe, share or download our iPhone App!

In 1543, before his departure from Spain to fight the French, Emperor Charles V left detailed guidance for his 15-year-old son Philip. These secret letters reminded his son of his many duties, including how to deal with his various kingdoms and peoples with diverse languages, customs, and regional identities - an issue that continues to resonate today in the Catalan Independence movement. Ray Ball is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern European and World History at UAA". She earned a doctorate in Early Modern European History from Ohio State University.

In 1543, before his departure from Spain to fight the French, Emperor Charles V left detailed guidance for his 15-year-old son Philip. The detailed written instructions, called Como Ser Rey, have been transcribed by Rachael Ball and Geoffrey Parker in a bilingual critical edition. These secret letters include frank assessments of officials and instructions on how kings should comport themselves and treat their subjects. Charles V reminded his son of his many duties, including how to deal with his various kingdoms and peoples with diverse languages, customs, and regional identities - an issue that continues to resonate today in the Catalan Independence movement. Ray Ball is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern European and World History at UAA". She earned a doctorate in Early Modern European History from Ohio State University.

  Fr. Larry gives Fr. Dave a quick history lesson on "The Diet of Worms", which, to Fr. Dave's dismay, has nothing to do with food.  The history involves Emperor Charles V, Martin Luther, Pope Leo X, and the Protestant Reformation.  It's a fascinating political and religious story worthy of a suspense novel.  

Dr. Paul Robinson and Dr. Cameron MacKenzie

This 85th episode of CS, is titled, Dawn.I want to take a brief moment here at the start to say “Thank you” to all those who've spread the word about CS to their friends and family. We've had a significant bump in subscribers and lots of new likes on the FB page. So—Kudos to all who've spread the word.As most of you know, iTunes is by far the major portal for podcasts. So, if you use iTunes, a review of CS is a great way to boost our rating – and ratings usually translate into new subscribers. Why do we want more subscribers since there's no commercial interest in CS? Because information and knowledge about history are crucial to a well-rounded worldview. I'm convinced an accurate view of history is crucial to overcoming prejudice, to tearing down the walls that divide people. That is when we discover not just WHAT people believe but WHY – it helps puts things in perspective and disabuses us of errant opinions.Anyway, that's my hope.As I've learned about different groups, I've revised my opinions. Traditions almost always have some origin in history, in some ground that at the time seemed perfectly reasonable to the people who created them. We may not agree with them today, hundreds and even thousands of years later, but at least we can respect those who originally framed them; and if not respect, gain a modicum of understanding for the complexities they wrestled with.Okay, back to it …We've come now to one of the most significant moments in Church History; the Reformation. Since it's considered by many the point at which the Protestant church arose, it's important to realize a couple of things.First – The student of history must remember almost all those who are today counted as the first Protestants were Roman Catholics. When they began the movement that would later be called the Reformation, they didn't call themselves anything other than Christians of the Western, Roman church. They began as an attempt to bring what they considered to be much-needed reform to the Church, not to start something new, but to return to something true. When the Roman hierarchy excommunicated them, the Reformers considered it less as THEY who were being thrust forth out of the Church as it was those who did the thrusting, pushed them out of the true church which was invisible and not to be equated with the visible religious institution HQ'd in Rome, presided over by the Pope. It's difficult to say for certain, but you get the sense from the writing of some of the Reformers that they hoped the day would come when the Roman church would recognize in their movement the true Gospel and come to embrace it. Little did they envision how deep and wide the break between them would become, and how their movement would shatter and scatter into so many different sects, just as the Roman hierarchy worried and warned.Second - There'd been groups that diverged from Roman Catholicism and its Eastern cousin the Orthodox Church, for a long time. We've already considered the Nestorian Church which dominated the Church in the Far East for hundreds of years and didn't lose its place of prominence until the Mongol invasions of the 13th C. There were little communities of what can be called non-aligned Christians scattered throughout Europe. And we'll consider some of those as we turn now to the Reformation.Long before Luther nailed his list of 95 topics for discussion to the chapel door at Wittenberg, others had sniped at the theological position of the Roman church.  There'd always had been some who didn't agree with its teaching, and many had broken off into separate religious communities.By way of review …Peter Waldo was one of the most effective of the pre-Reformers. A wealthy merchant of Lyons, France, moved by Matthew 19:21, he was convinced that poverty in the service to Christ was the path to heaven. So three centuries before Martin Luther, he sold his estate and gave the proceeds to the poor. Within a year, he was joined by others, both men and women, who called themselves the “Poor Men of Lyons,” and took on an itinerant ministry of preaching repentance and living from handouts. These were an early form of what came to be the mendicant monks.Thinking themselves to be good Roman Catholics, they appealed to the Third Lateran Council in 1179 for permission to preach but were refused because they were considered ignorant and unlearned laymen. But they were convinced they were like the first followers of Jesus and should obey God rather than men. So, Peter and his followers continued to preach.In 1184, Pope Lucius III excommunicated them for their disobedience. Contrary to what we might expect, this brought numerous supporters, and the movement spread into southern France, Italy, Spain, the Rhine Valley, and Bohemia. That they gained such support after being drop-kicked by Rome leaves the impression the Church's reputation wasn't so grand, at least in the regions where the Waldensians lived and worked.It's hard to know if all those called “Waldensian” were really followers of Peter Waldo or if contemporary opponents just used that term as a blanket description for the many disaffected individuals who opposed the Church. It's possible as well that many smaller groups of non-aligned Christians emerged from hiding to join the Waldensians.Whatever the case, they took the New Testament as a rule of life and used it in what we might call a legalistic sense. They went about 2 by 2, wearing simple clothing, preaching repentance, frequent fasting, and living from the gifts of others. They rejected the doctrine of purgatory, masses and prayers for the dead, and promoted the necessity for translations of Scripture in people's native language. They insisted on the right of anyone to preach, man or woman—but they did have some organization among their clergy, with bishops, priests, and deacons.While Peter Waldo never embraced the doctrines we'd call genuinely evangelical, his emphasis on Scripture as the basis of faith and practice opened the door for his followers to become so.The Waldensians were persecuted harshly for centuries. Part of the reason for their widespread distribution in Europe was that they were driven from their homeland. In Bohemia, they ultimately became part of the followers of Jan Hus. In their mountain retreat of the Alps between France and Italy, their homeland by the time of the Reformation, they met with representatives of the Swiss Reformation in 1532 and adopted the theology and government of the Swiss Reformers. Then, in 1545, about 4000 were massacred in Provence, France. It wasn't until 1848 that they won recognition. Today they number about 20,000, the only medieval separatist group to survive to the present.That brings us to the next pre-reformer, the Englishman JOHN WYCLIFFE, who we've already looked at.John Wycliffe lived about 200 yrs after Peter Waldo. Like Waldo, Wycliffe was determined to derive his theology, both theoretical and practical, from Scripture. Like the Waldensians, Wycliffe encouraged the translation of the Bible into the common language and that anyone ought to be able to preach, not just sanctioned and licensed clergy.Though he personally translated or supervised the translation of parts of the Bible, the version given his name wasn't completed until after his death. Its widespread use had an influence on the development of the English language. Wycliffe was educated at Oxford and later became a master of Balliol College there. For a while chaplain to the king, with access to Parliament, he was able to reach some of the upper-class English. But he also sought to reach the common people, sending out lay evangelists to instruct them.After 1375, Wycliffe's reforming views developed rapidly. Pope Gregory XI condemned him in 1377 for his efforts, but he was protected by some of the nobles and the powerful John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and son of Edward III. These were the days of the Hundred Years War between England and France, when it was unthinkable an Englishmen would surrender one of their most outstanding countrymen to a pope at Avignon, under the domination of England's French foes.To Wycliffe, Scripture, which he interpreted literally, was the sole authority for the believer. Decrees of the pope were not infallible except as based on Scripture. The clergy were not to rule, but to serve and help people. He concluded that Christ and not the pope was the head of the church; in fact, the pope, if he were too eager for worldly power, might even be regarded as the Antichrist. Ultimately, Wycliffe repudiated the entire papal system. He also attacked transubstantiation, the Roman doctrine that the bread and wine of Communion become the actual body and blood of Christ in the Mass.  Wycliffe condemned the doctrine of purgatory, the use of relics, pilgrimages, and indulgences. For all this, he's called the Morningstar of the Reformation.Wycliffe's followers were forcefully suppressed in 1401. Those who held his views went underground and helped to prepare the way for the British Reformation a century later. Bohemians studying at Oxford in Wycliffe's day carried his ideas to their homeland, where they influenced the teachings of Jan Hus, another pre-reformer we've already looked at, but whom we'll consider again now in this set up for the Reformation.Hus was the professor of philosophy at the University of Prague and lead preacher at Bethlehem Chapel.  Historians used to think Hus transported Wycliffe's views to Prague but it seems clear now that while Hus was later influenced by Wycliffe's views, his reforms ran tandem to what was happening in England.Hus's approach was similar to Wycliffe's but his influence in Europe was greater than that of the Englishman's. Luther was greatly impressed with the work of Jan Hus. His greatest work was titled On the Church. He said that all the elect are members of Christ's church, of which Christ, rather than the pope, is head. He argued against simony, indulgences, and abuses of the mass. He demanded a reform in the lives of clergy, and the right of laymen to take both the bread and wine in Communion.Hus became the leader of a reform movement that spread across Bohemia. Almost the entire realm supported him, in spite of being excommunicated by the pope. After Hus's death the reform carried on, and in the middle of the 15th Century the Bohemian Brethren rose out of the embers of the fire Hus lit. They still exist as the Moravians.The 4th pre-Reformer was Savonarola who lived in Florence, Italy in the late 15th C. He was a fiery preacher against the worldliness and corruption of church and society. A Dominican, he was transferred to the priory of San Marco in 1482 and rose in influence and power in the city. His studies in the OT prophets and the book of Revelation made him a powerful preacher against the evils of a decadent society.Savonarola served as the spiritual leader of the political party that came to power in Florence when the Medicis fled the city in 1494. Exercising a virtual dictatorship, he tried to reform both the church and state. But over time, the people of Florence found his rule too strict and used his criticism of the Roman Church as the excuse to remove him from office. Pope Alexander VI's excommunication of Savonarola in 1497 was all the Florentines needed to arrest and try him for sedition and heresy. He was cruelly tortured then hanged in the piazza before the city hall, not far from where Michelangelo's David would stand just 5 years later.Although Savonarola demanded reform in the church, he never took the more advanced position of Wycliffe and Hus. He had no quarrel with the teachings or the organization of the church but seems to have believed in justification by faith.At the same time, Wycliffe and Hus were leading their attempts at reform, a mystical movement flowered in northern Europe. Known as The Brethren of the Common Life, they emphasized Bible reading, meditation, prayer, personal piety, and religious education. The main aim of the Brethren was to secure a revival of practical religion. They gathered in homes rather than monasteries, held property in common, worked to support themselves, and avoided the ill-will of the communities in which they lived by not seeking tax-exempt status or begging. They had good relations with the townspeople but sometimes incurred the suspicion and opposition of the clergy and monks. They attended parish churches and had no peculiar doctrinal positions.The Brethren were committed to education. They established several schools in the Netherlands and Germany that were outstanding for scholarship and piety. Four of their best-known students were Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Luther, and Thomas à Kempis, who's credited with writing the widely distributed Imitation of Christ.Europe was a seething kettle by 1500, ready to boil over. In the realms of economics, politics, education, and religion, the time had come for change. All that was needed was someone who could mold these explosive elements into a single movement. Such a movement could, and eventually would cover Europe.There are a couple of reasons that need to be stated for why the Reformation succeeded—besides the obvious one many Protestant Christians would note first > It was God's Will.The more pedantic reasons are two-fold:First – The Great Papal Schism had left a bad taste in the mouth of many Christians in Europe. How could the Pope, the Vicar of Christ not be able to keep the Church together? And how could the Pope become such an obvious tool in the hand of secular rulers? The corruption of the Church was so obvious, so blatant, even the most devoted churchmen were embarrassed and wrote impassioned pleas for reform.And that leads us to the second reason the Reformation occurred; this was the age when the nation-states of Europe were emerging. Kings and regional governors were coming out from under the thumb of the Church hierarchy. Instead of Popes being king-makers, kings made popes. And some kings decided they didn't want to play Rome's game at all. They wanted to take their ball and go home to start their own game. If only someone would write some new rules.Enter: Martin Luther.In central Europe, the Holy Roman Empire which was essentially a German entity, had an emperor check-mated by numerous states with only slight allegiance to him. Muslim armies knocked at the doors of the empire not long after Luther tacked his theses to the church door at Wittenberg. After toppling Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks strolled across Eastern Europe until they stood at the gates of Vienna in 1529.What really happened was this. Charles, a Hapsburg with holdings in central Europe and king of the Netherlands and Spain, was elected in 1519 as Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Francis I of France, surrounded by Charles' territory and defeated by him in 1525, made an alliance with the Ottomans in 1526 to apply a pincer movement against Charles. The Emperor needed the help of all his German vassals to defeat the Muslims. When some of the German princes became supporters of Luther, Charles was no longer able to put religious pressure on them. If he did, they'd withhold aiding him politically and militarily. So Charles wasn't able to force Luther's political covering, the powerful Frederick of Saxony, to surrender Luther when the Pope demanded his head on a pike.This is all very fun, isn't it?Now consider this à Just a few years after Luther's birth, Columbus reached the New World in 1492 and launched the Spanish Empire in the West. Shortly after Luther posted his theses, Magellan's expedition sailed around the world. At the same time, the Portuguese were establishing outposts of empire in Brazil, Africa, India, and the Far East.Did you know Columbus and Luther were contemporaries?Let's not forget as well that a whole new world of thought had come in with the tide of the Renaissance. Rediscovering the literature and thoughts of the classical age, contributed to a greater secularization of life.Humanism was one of the main features of the Renaissance, involving a new emphasis on man and his culture and an effort to make the world a better place in which human beings might live. The pull of the future life was not so great for the true child of the Renaissance as it had been for his ancestors during the Middle Ages. As has been said, the Renaissance man would rather eat his pie now than have it in the sky by and by.In harkening back to the literature of the Classical Age, humanists put renewed emphasis on the study of Greek and Hebrew in an effort to read the classics in the original languages. The greatest of all ancient documents was the Bible, and the renewed emphasis on ancient languages led many to the Scripture.The literary humanists included a good deal of biblical study in their academic diet, and it was in the north that the Reformation gained the most headway, among scholars like Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Erasmus.Erasmus was a great satirist of the evils of the institutional church and society. That he got away with it and was so popular proves that criticism of Romanism by Renaissance leaders contributed to the success of the Reformation.Adding to the effectiveness of the Reformation was the Renaissance spirit of individualism, which paved the way for Luther's emphasis on the priesthood of the believer and its attendant ideas of the right of believers to go directly to God and to interpret the Scriptures for themselves.Another important ingredient of the intellectual development of Europe on the eve of the Reformation was the invention of movable type and the spread of printing. Without it the Reformers would not have had the same impact. The tremendous literary activity of the Reformers was largely responsible for building the printing trade.Lastly, an important phenomenon of the period was the rapid growth of universities, which provided education for a larger number of people, fostered a critical spirit, and provided a means for leaders of the emerging generation to be reached with Reformation principles.As we end this episode, I wanted to let you know that the donation feature is once more active on the CS site. We had to block it for a while because fraud did a lot of damage. You've heard reports of identity theft. It seems once crooks snag a bunch of credit accounts, they check to see if they're still valid by using sites like CS to post a bogus donation of 1 to $5. If it goes through, they know the accounts good and make real charges. Problem is, EVERY time my account gets one of these bogus donations, the bank charges me a transaction fee. Let's just say, 10K bogus donations made for a hefty cost to the CS account. So we had to block the donation feature until the proper security could be installed. That's done now thanks to the excellent work of Dade Ronan at Win at Web. Thanks, Dade. You're a genius!So, if you'd be so kind, a donation to keep the site up would be marvelous.

This episode of CS is titled, Luther's Struggle.As we saw last time, Luther's situation after appearing before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms didn't look hopeful. The majority of officials there decided to apply the papal bull excommunicating Luther and removing his protection. Some of the nobles knew they could incur the Pope's favor by taking matters into their own hands and assassinating the troublesome priest. But the German prince Frederick the Wise, one of the Emperor's most important supporters, arranged to air-quotes à “kidnap" Luther on his way back to Wittenberg. He secreted Luther to his castle at Wartburg under an assumed identity. Now in hiding, Luther used the time to translate the NT from Greek into a superbly simple German Bible.  He finished it in the Fall of 1522 and followed it up with an OT translation from Hebrew. This took longer and wasn't finished till 1534. The completed Bible proved to be no less a force in the German-speaking world than the King James Version was later to be in the English sphere, and it's considered one of Luther's most valuable contributions.The revolt against Rome sparked by Luther's list tacked to the castle church door at Wittenberg began to spread.  In town after town, priests and town councils removed statues from churches and abandoned the Mass. More priests and monks stepped forward, adding their voice to the call for reform, many more radical than Luther. More importantly, an increasing number of civil officials decided to back Luther in defiance of the Emperor and Pope.By 1522, it was clear to Luther he could safety return to Wittenberg and put into practice the reforms he was convinced the Church needed to install. What he did there became the model for a good part of Germany. He abolished the office of bishop because he couldn't find it in Scripture. Local churches needed pastors who were servants, not a religious royalty.During his time at the Wartburg, Luther gave much thought to the issue of celibacy. He wrote a tract called On Monastic Vows where he expounded on the idea that a sequestered life wasn't really Biblical.  When he returned to Wittenberg, he dissolved the monasteries and ended clerical celibacy. The resources of the monasteries were used to relieve the poor, and marriages between former celibates became the order of the day. Erasmus noted that the tragedy of the break with Rome looked like it would finish as a comedy; with everyone married and living happily ever after.Luther himself took a wife in 1525, the former nun, Katherine von Bora. The story goes she was an eminently practical woman but not all that attractive. When her fellow sisters got married, she was left single and approached Luther, saying it was his fault she was now alone and without support. She suggested it was his duty to remedy her situation. When he asked how he as supposed to do that, she replied marrying her was his best option. So he did.A new image of full-time ministry appeared in western Christianity—the married pastor living like any other man with his own family. Luther later wrote, “There is a lot to get used to in the first year of marriage. One wakes up in the morning and finds a pair of pigtails on the pillow which were not there before.” By all accounts, while Martin and Katherine's marriage began as a purely pragmatic arrangement, the love between them grew into a rich joy. Luther was deeply affectionate to his wife, who often was instrumental in keeping Luther's frequent dark moods from overwhelming him. They had six children.Martin and Katherine lived in what had been the Augustinian convent. Their house was nearly always full of guests who enjoyed sitting at their table. Some of his students the Luthers had in for meals took down their conversation, now published in a work called Table Talk.Luther understood if Reform was to take root and grow, it had to be fueled by the study of the Bible. Studying Scripture required the ability to read it and to reason logically. So he placed a great emphasis on education and urged parents to send their children to school. To assist in the education of youth, he composed a Large Catechism in 1528, then a more popular Small Catechism a year later. In the Small Catechism, Luther gave a simple exposition of the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the two sacraments. He offered forms for confession, morning and evening prayers, and grace at meals.Keep in mind Luther hadn't begun in 1517 with a fully developed theological position and a plan to Reform the Roman church or break away and start a separate religious franchise.  That was nowhere on the horizon. When he tacked his list on Wittenberg's church door, it was simply a reflection of his desire that church officials begin examining both long-held traditions and more recent innovations by holding them up to the light of Scripture. As things progressed, Luther realized he had to follow his own advice.Many Protestants have heard of Luther's 95 Theses but they've not read them. It's surprising to see what he calls for people to examine there. Turns out, there's little in Luther's List that ended up in the core doctrines of the Reformation. But once Luther embraced the principle of reviewing everything in the light of God's Word, a far more complete doctrinal picture began to take shape. He saw his way clear in the matter of justification by grace thru faith. When he applied this to the issue of indulgences is when he popped up on Rome's radar. His emerging understanding of the priesthood of all believers was a threat Rome couldn't ignore because it threatened their religious hegemony. Soon, everything was being scrutinized in the light of Scripture.Luther translated the Latin liturgy into German. People began receiving Communion in both bread and wine. The emphasis in church services switched from the celebration of the Mass to the preaching and teaching of God's Word.In 1524, Germany got a taste of how far reaching Luther's call for reforms could reach. His insistence that church and society follow the commands of Scripture led to an uprising of the peasants against the nobility.  The people applied the concept of the freedom of the Christian to the economic and social spheres. Long kept under the domineering thumb of the nobility, the peasants revolted against their feudal lords. They demanded an end to medieval serfdom, unless it could be justified from the Bible, and relief from the excessive services demanded of them which kept them in virtual slavery.At the beginning of their protest, Luther agreed with the peasants and recognized the justice of their complaints. What he stridently warned against was the use of violence to enforce their will on a recalcitrant nobility. When violence did break out, he lashed out against the peasants. Since the printing press was already a major part of his work, he employed it again and wrote a pamphlet titled, Against the Thievish and Murderous Hordes of Peasants.  In it, Luther called on the princes to “knock down, strangle, stab … and think nothing so venomous, pernicious, or Satanic as an insurgent.”In 1525, the nobles crushed the revolt at a cost of some 100,000 lives. The survivors now called Luther a false prophet. Many of them returned to Catholicism or turned to more radical forms of the Reformation.Luther's conservative political and economic views devolved from his belief that the equality of all men before God applied to spiritual rather than secular matters. Though these views alienated the common people, they proved a boon to Luther's influence with the German princes, many of whom became Lutheran in part because Luther's views allowed them to control the Church in their territories, thereby strengthening their power and wealth.In 1530, a conference of Reformation leaders convened in Augsburg to draw up a common Statement of Faith. The leadership of the movement had already begun to move beyond Luther. He was still an outlaw and unable to attend. So the task of presenting Luther's ideas fell to his colleague, a young professor of Greek at Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon. The young scholar drafted the Augsburg Confession signed by Lutheran princes and theologians. And though a growing movement of the German nobility now threw their weight behind the Reform, Emperor Charles V, who depended on their support, was no more inclined to join the movement than he'd been a Worms.After 1530, Charles made clear his intention to crush the growing heresy. The Lutheran princes banded together in 1531 in the Schmalkald League, and between 1546 and 55 there was scattered, on-and-off-again civil war. The combatants reached a compromise in the Peace of Augsburg, which allowed each prince to decide the religion of his subjects, with the only acceptable options being Lutheran or Catholic, and ordered all Catholic bishops to give up their property if they turned Lutheran.The effects of this treaty were profound. Lutheranism became a State religion in large portions of the Empire. It spread north to Scandinavia. Religious opinions became the private property of princes, and individuals had to believe what their prince chose.Luther remained engaged in unending debate with the Roman Church. And it wasn't long before he found himself embroiled in disagreements with other reformers. Outspoken and combative, he often collided with equally fierce opponents. These controversies took on a bitter edge that saw Luther hurling vicious epithets at his opponents. The insults he'd once used for the Pope were turned on fellow Reformers. All this greatly hampered reform.For example, Luther became entangled in a controversy with the humanist scholar and reformer Erasmus. The two had much in common, sharing concerns for scholarship, for opening up the Scriptures, and for doctrinal and practical reform. Still, they differed sharply in character and theological approach. Under pressure to declare himself either for Luther or against him, Erasmus turned to the important issue of the freedom of the will and published a work titled, Diatribe on Free Will in 1524. To this Luther made a scornfully sharp reply a year later in his Bondage of the Will. This work is a powerful statement of the Augustinian position that in matters of righteousness and salvation human will has no power to act apart from God's enabling grace. Erasmus replied to Luther's reply, but Luther ignored it. Erasmus then aligned himself with opponents of the Reformation, although still urging reform and maintaining friendly relations with other reformers.The Lutherans themselves experienced a split over how to understand Communion. Like a bulldog, Luther clung to the words of Jesus "This is my body" as supporting his belief that Jesus was present in the elements. When the Southern Germans and Swiss broke away saying that the elements were meant ot be understood as symbolic, Luther published a couple of scathing responses in 1526 and 7. There's a coarseness to his style in the second of these that may indicate Luther had no desire to win his opponents, only to insult them.Since this is a history and not theology podcast, I'm not going to go into all the nuances of the Eucharistic debate that ensued between the Lutherans and other Reformers. Suffice it to say, it became one of the major issues of controversy between them.Luther ran into other difficulties, too.He hoped at first that the renewing of the Gospel would open the way for the conversion of the Jews. When that didn't pan out, he made virulent attacks on them, planting a deep stain on his record. Philip of Hesse, a champion of the Reformation, became an embarrassment to Luther when he gave assent to Philip's bigamous marriage in 1540. The development of armed religious alliances in the empire worried Luther, for while he accepted the divine authorization of princes and valued their help in practical reformation, he struggled hard for the principle that the Gospel does not need to be advanced or defended by military power. He was spared the conflict that came so soon after his death.Even his sympathetic biographers have found it hard to justify some of Luther's actions in his declining years. By the time of his death in 1546, says biographer Roland Bainton, Luther was “an irascible old man, petulant, peevish, unrestrained, and at times positively coarse.” As chance would have it, his schedule brought him to Eisleben, the town of his birth, where he died on Feb. 18, 1546.Fortunately, the personal defects of an aging rebel don't in any way detract from the greatness of Luther's achievements, which transformed not only Christianity but Western civilization. He took four basic concerns and offered vital new answers.To the question - How is a person saved, Luther replied: not by works but by faith alone.To the question - Where does religious authority lie, he answered: not in the visible institution called the Roman church but in the Word of God found in the Bible.To the question—What is the church?—he responded: the whole community of Christian believers, since all are priests before God.And last, to the question—What is the center of the Christian life?—he replied: serving God in any useful calling, whether ordained or not.

We left off last time with the close of the Diet of Worms where Martin Luther informed the august assembled officials of both civil government & Church, that he'd not recant what he'd either written or said, because his opponents weren't able to refute him with Scripture.From the now emerging Protestant perspective Worms was a turning point from which there was no going back.Reading of the events in that improvised hall in the German town of Worms, we get the idea that Luther issued his memorable declaration of devotion to Scripture & conscience, then strode from the room to the cheers of the supporting German nobles and chagrin of his imperial and Roman opponents. And that was that. The Trial was over.Not so fast. Luther's speech in fact did NOT close the Diet. His words weren't the last. Emperor Charles V's secretarial spokesman who was conducting the inquiry replied to Luther on that April day in 1521. He deserves also to be heard. He re­buked Luther for making himself superior to the historic Church Councils that had already ruled on several of the issues Luther declaimed. Regarding Luther's arrogance in supposing he could sit in judgment on The Church, he said, “In this, you're completely mad. For what purpose does it serve to raise a new dispute about matters condemned through so many centu­ries by church and council? Unless perhaps a reason must be given to just anyone about anything whatsoever. But if it were granted that whoever contradicts the councils and the common understanding of the church must be overcome by Scripture passages, we will have noth­ing in Christianity that is certain or decided.”The secretary raised an important point; one Roman Catholic apologists would keep asking of Protestants in the decades to come. Luther had famously said his conscience was held captive to the Word of God. The secretary came back with the reply in effect, “People who want to put their own spin on the meaning of Scripture have been claiming that for a long time. What makes you, a humble German monk, better equipped to interpret Scripture than the august luminaries of the Church's history? If and when personal conviction replaces the official, authorized position of the Church, derived not by one person's opinion, but a collection of several experts, then the Christian religion will shatter into a bo-zillion pieces.And in some ways, that was a prescient appraisal of things to come.Next day, April 19, while Luther was locked in private disputes with representatives of the Emperor & Pope, Charles had a document he'd written read out to the gathered German nobles. He reminded them he was descended from a long line of faithful defenders of The Faith from Germany, Spain, Austria, & Burgundy. He wanted it made clear that he was no novice in the theological disputes heard at Worms. He wasn't at all impressed with Luther or his position. He said, “It's certain that a single friar errs in his opinion which is against all of Christendom and according to which all of Christianity will be and will always have been in error both in the past thousand years and even more in the present.” He made it clear that he understood his role at the trial as being called on to join his noble ancestors and defend the Faith against an attack that threatened to irreparably splinter it. He at least, got that part right. The Church was never the same after the Diet of Worms.As we ponder Luther's address—looked at in the last episode, and these responses by his imperial and ecclesiastical opponents, we realize what was really at stake at Worms. Once again, History provides us 20/20 vision. The Western Church was split now into 2 great camps; Protestant and Roman Catholic. That breach has lasted 500 years. But it also presaged the rift between civil and ecclesias­tical power. Civil rulers of all ranks broke with Rome in becoming Protestant. Others, remaining Catholic, realized now how much the Rome needed them.A more subtle idea was introduced at Worms that took a while to germinate in the soil of Europe, but once it did, it would have far-reaching consequences. It was the idea, expressed so articulately by Luther, that the individual person, no matter what their social rank or economic status, possessed a dignity and conscience that trumped the man-made rankings of church and state. That idea was regarded by the Charles & his nobles as a supremely dangerous idea; far too dangerous to allow. Heaven forbid a peasant would see himself as possessing the same value as a baron; or a layperson as a cardinal. Why, that would set the whole world upside down.And so it did.Let's back up in time now to track how that particular Martin Luther arrived at Worms in April 1521.He was born 30 miles NW of Leipzig in the Saxon mining town of Eisleben in Eastern Germany in 1483. He was 9 when Cristoforo Columbo staggered ashore in the New World & the Moors were finally pushed out of Spain. Europe was rapidly emerging from the lethargy of a long out of date feudalism that had hampered growth.His father gave Martin the best education in law the Luther's could afford, hoping he'd become a town councilor; a position from which to ride to comfortable prosperity. But as Martin matured, so too did his sense of self. His ambitions turned form worldly success to a desperate longing to know he met God's approval. But the more he reached for it, the further away it seemed. In 1505, at the age of 22, he made good on an oath he'd made to God and entered an monastery in Erfurt. That oath was made during a freak lightning storm that terrified Luther. He swore if God preserved him, he'd become a monk. He didn't die, so Luther made good on his pledge. This gives us an idea of the sober integrity of the man.Living in a cloister as a young monk, we'd assume Luther saw himself as earning points with God. After all, that's certainly the way most monks viewed it. Not our Luther! It seemed like every good deed he did, every meritorious work his superiors suggested, only served to increase Luther's sense of guilt. His personal confidant was the godly & wise, Johann von Staupitz. Luther regularly lamented his deplorable sinfulness to the elder Staupitz who tried several tactics to help the earnest young man rid himself of his crippling sense of guilt. Nothing worked. So Staupitz suggested Luther distract himself by immersing himself in the study of Scripture. He then arranged for Martin to take an advanced degree in theology tpo the end he'd begin teaching at a university and put all his nervous energy to good use. So, just before turning 30, Luther began teaching Scripture at the new University in Wittenberg.The demands of being a monk and professor certainly gave Luther much to do. But it wasn't enough to keep him from his quest for personal holiness. The more he wanted it, the more elusive it became. He knew he was supposed to love God but his increasing frustration was coming out in a loath for the Deity that further afflicted his soul. He was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. The Gospel promised forgiveness, but the Church said penance was the way to expunge the souls of the sense of guilt. Why then, after availing himself of literally EVERY form of penance the Church prescribed, was he MORE guilty than ever?It was as Luther taught his students in Wittenberg the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans that the light BEGAN to come on for him. I say “began” because while there was indeed a moment when it seemed the switch flipped, the implications of what Luther discovered echoed through his soul for months after.You see, Luther was consumed with being righteous before God. Following the understanding of the Church of his day, he assumed righteousness was something a person secured by doing the prescribed good deeds. Oh and hey, if you couldn't produce your own righteousness, you could buy something called an indulgence; a special certificate offered by the Church that drew on the surplus of righteousness the saints had laid up in heaven for needy souls – called the “Treasury of Merit.”But as Martin read the words of Romans 3 he was confronted by a totally new idea of righteousness. The Apostle Paul says the righteousness God's looking for isn't something we produce. The only righteousness that qualifies us for heaven is a perfect righteousness. And there's only one who's perfectly righteous – God Himself. So God gives us that perfect righteousness when we put our faith in Christ. It's a gift, not a reward. And the gfift is received by Faith, not works.Here's what Luther read that utterly transformed his thinking à Romans 3:21–26But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as an atoning sacrifice by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.Luther later said that as soon as the realization came to him that it's not his righteousness but God's that saves, suddenly a slew of other passages came flooding into his memory affirming and adding further insight. It was like a key and been slipped into a lock that opened the door to a mansion of blessing. All of Scripture took on a new color, scent & flavor.Prior to this revelation, that is earlier in his studied in Romans, Luther had struggled with a passage in ch1 where Paul in vs16&17 says àFor I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”Martin says that perplexed him and began him thinking his understanding of righteousness might be off. What was this reference to “the righteousness of God.” And how does faith issue into justification? With the insight of ch3, now he knew. Righteousness is a gift God bestows by faith.But this isn't what threatened the Religious Establishment. Luther later acknowledged there were many others who'd taken a spiritual journey similar to his. Augustine in the 4th C., the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus a C before Luther and the Dutch pastor John Wessel a couple decades before. No, it wasn't Gift Righteousness that Catholic officials were concerned about. It was Luther's insistence the Church had gone off the rails in many of its everyday practices. Those practices clouded the glory of a soul set free by God's grace. And he was determined to do something about it. What brought him to the attention of those who'd eventually come out against him was his assault on the sale of indulgences, by which not a few Church officials were getting rich, including the Pope.We'll pick it up at this point in our next episode.

This episode of CS is the 3rd Overview in the series so far.We've spent quite a bit of time tracking the Reformation and need now to give a brief overview and analysis of what we've seen as we prepare for launching into the next era of Church History.There's a well-worn saying in English I'm not sure other languages duplicate. It says that “you can't see the forest for the trees.” The idea is that details can obscure the bigger picture. You fail to see a forest because all you see is a lot of trees.As we've spent many episodes tracking the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, we may be so distracted by all the names, places, dates and movements, we miss the larger picture and the summary effect of all this on the people of 16th C.Trends from the previous century came to fruition in the 16th that made for a monumental shift in people's idea of what The Church was. Consider a couple of the things that happened in the 15th C.Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.The New World was opened to Europe at the close of the Century. Till then, European Christians felt hemmed in by Muslims to the S and E, and by the Atlantic to the W. Missions were conceived of almost exclusively as the conversion of Muslims. Challenges to Christianity were pretty much limited to the threat of an aggressive Islam. That view seemed potent when news of the Fall of Constantinople washed over Western Europe.Yet in the hundred years of the 16th C, the situation changed dramatically. To the E and S, Islam was countered by the Spanish Reconquista and the failure of the Turks to take Vienna. The Battle of Lepanto in 1571 saw the end of Muslim naval power in the Mediterranean. Muslims armies, which had seemed irresistible till then, began to roll back.Then, the Atlantic, once an impassable barrier, suddenly became a highway. New worlds opened with the discovery of The New World. Sailing W, Spanish conquistadors conquered a realm far larger than their homeland.The Portuguese sailed S around Africa, setting up trade centers and missions in the Far East. And Islam, which had appeared the greatest barrier to Christian expansion, saw its main territory surrounded by the growing economic and military power of Europe. North Africa and western Asia shifted from being Muslim realms to European colonies.In all these lands newly opened to Europeans, Christianity established a foothold. Some of them would centuries later become their own vibrant center of missionary outreach at a time when Europe was growing increasingly secular.But, few who lived in the 15th C could comprehend the massive consequences of the events they witnessed. When Spain and Portugal came near to blows over who had the rights to what, the pope thought he could work a compromise by decreeing the W belonged to Spain while the E belonged to Portugal. But what about when sailing W leads to the E, and vice versa? The inevitable conflict was played out in the Philippines.King Ferdinand of Spain and his grandson, the famous Emperor Charles V, before whom Luther appeared at the Diet of Worms, were far more concerned with the politics of Europe than the promises of a New World. That would be like a company in the Year 2000 being more concerned with the telegraph than mobile cellphones.During the 16th C, when these vast geopolitical changes were taking place, the towering edifice of medieval Christianity collapsed. The Council of Trent tried to salvage what it could and set the scene for what became modern Catholicism. Protestantism diffused into dozens of groups amid the ruins of the medieval Church. The long-held ideal of a single church, with the vicar of Christ as its visible head, never a view held by the Eastern Church, lost its power in the West as well. From then on, Western Christianity was divided among a plethora of groups divided up along cultural and doctrinal differences.In spite of corruption and the many voices calling for reform, there was agreement among Christians the Church was in essence one, and its unity ought to be manifest in its organization. Most chief figures of the Reformation at first held such an understanding of the Church. Only a few rejected it. Most Protestant leaders believed the unity of the Church was crucial to its nature, and that although it was temporarily necessary to break unity to be faithful to God's Word, that faithfulness demanded all effort at regaining unity.As in the Middle Ages, people of the early 16th C took for granted that the survival of a nation-state required religious agreement among its subjects. That notion, which Christians rejected when a minority in the old Roman Empire, became the prevailing view after the conversion of Constantine. All who lived in a Christian state must be Christian and faithful members of THE Church. A bare-few places allowed Jews and Muslims to live among them but only as a lower-class, disenfranchised and persecuted.This view of national and concomitant religious uniformity is what led to the many wars of religion of the 16th and 17th Cs. Then, in some areas sooner than others, a conclusion was reached that religious tolerance was preferable to the devastation these wars brought. So began the long process, as one after another the various European states adopted policies of religious tolerance. That produced the modern idea of the secular state.The 16th C also witnessed the collapse of the ancient dream of political unity under an Empire. Charles V was the last emperor who would harbor such illusions. After him, the so-called emperors were little more than kings of Germany with limited power.The Conciliarist hope of reforming the Church was also shaken. For several decades, Protestant reformers hoped a universal council would set the pope's house in order. But the opposite took place. The papacy achieved its own reformation without help from a council.  By the time the Council of Trent met, it was obvious it wouldn't be an ecumenical council so much as a papal tool.Sincere believers, both Protestant and Catholic, saw many of the old certainties crumble around them. Discoveries taking place in the New World posed questions unanswerable by the old guidelines. Medieval foundations like papacy, empire, and tradition, no longer held. As Galileo had demonstrated the Earth wasn't a fixed point of reference, now it seemed there was NO fixed point to be trusted.Such were the times of Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the other great reformers. While the world was in chaos, they resolved to stand firm in Faith and the power of the Word of God. Luther and Calvin insisted that the power of the Word was such that, as long as the Roman Church continued reading, even though the pope and his advisors refused to listen, there was always in the Roman communion a “vestige of the church.” So they anticipated the day when the Church would once again cleave to the Word and set aside their differences to emerge in a united church once more.