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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    File:Lucas Cranach d.Ä. - Martin Luther, 1528 (Veste Coburg).jpg
    Martin Luther

    The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform movement that began in Germany in 1517 when Martin Luther began objecting publicly to the sale of Indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church. The movement of those who ‘protested’ against the church soon expanded to criticize a huge array of different ways in which the church was run, its worldliness, riches, alleged idolatry and corruption of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Lutheranism spread quickly to places like the Swiss Confederacy, the Low Countries, Denmark and Sweden. As it did, different forms of Protestantism swiftly emerged between the 1520s and 1540s, such as Calvinism and Anabaptism. By the 1550s and 1560s it was taking hold in places like England and Scotland and was forming new branches such as Presbyterianism. It was also being adopted as the state religion in Denmark, England, Swiss city states like Geneva, and Scotland. Conflict followed it everywhere and the European Wars of Religion would rage across most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Reformation had immense consequences for migration. For instance, religious divisions in Europe and oppression of religious minorities led to these groups voyaging overseas to European colonies in places like New England, Pennsylvania and the Dutch Cape Colony in southern Africa. It also created considerable internal migration within Europe such as the flight of hundreds of thousands of French Huguenots (Protestants) from France in the late seventeenth century.[1]

    Protestant Reformation chronology of eventsProtestant Reformation chronology of events

    The Protestant Reformation began in the early sixteenth century in response to longstanding issues that were inherent in the Roman Catholic Church coming out of the High Middle Ages. Critics of the church stated that it was too worldly and had become a political entity rather than a religious one. It possessed huge wealth and resources and the Papacy ruled over a temporal state that controlled central Italy. Cardinals, bishops, priests and even monks ignored the rules they were expected to live by, siring families and raising sons, brothers and nephews to positions of power within the church that they were completely unqualified for. On top of this worldly and corrupt behavior, there were serious concerns over the very nature of Catholicism by the sixteenth century. The cult of the saints, for instance, was perceived by critics to be a kind of legacy of the Pagan worship of local gods and goddesses, while many theologians believed that lots of elements of Christian worship that were sanctioned by the Papacy had no basis in doctrine as laid out in the Christian New Testament. For instance, opponents of the church noted that several of the seven sacraments promoted by the Catholic Church, such as the sacrament of First Confirmation, bore no relation to anything that was written about concerning Jesus Christ in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament.[2]

    File:Jan hus 1.jpg
    Jan Hus of Bohemia

    Martin Luther was not the first theologian to give voice to these issues. As early as the 1380s John Wycliffe, an English priest and professor of theology, had inspired a movement known as the Lollards who objected to the organized church and its corruption in England.[3] Thirty years later Jan Hus rose to prominence in Bohemia (modern-day Czechia) by splitting from the official church in a similar way.[4] What marked Martin Luther as different was the manner in which his views spread so swiftly around Europe aided by the invention of movable type and the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century. Luther’s initial objection was to the sale of indulgences in Germany, documents which basically remitted sins in advance of them being committed. These certificates were being sold in huge numbers in Germany to bring in money for the Papacy in Rome. After his initial criticisms gained traction in 1517 Luther expanded his comments and writings to attack many other aspects of the Roman Catholic Church and the corruption of the Pope, cardinals and bishops who ran it.[5]

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    King Gustav I of Sweden

    Luther’s followers soon became known as both Lutherans and Protestants. By the middle of the 1520s Protestant communities were emerging across Central Europe and into France, northern Italy, the Swiss Confederacy, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and southern England. In 1527 King Gustav I Vasa of Sweden became the first king of a major European state to convert to Protestantism.[6] Denmark would follow in the 1530s. England was more complicated. On the one hand, King Henry VIII allowed a faction of Protestants into his government in the early 1530s and implemented some Protestant-like reforms in order to split from Rome and acquire a divorce from his first wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, but he remained a doctrinal Catholic to the day he died. England oscillated between Protestantism and Catholicism during the middle of the sixteenth century before finally settling on a moderate form of Protestantism during the reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I.[7] The Dutch Republic emerged as an independent nation from under Spanish rule in part because Spain remained firmly in the Catholic camp, as did the Italian city states, Austria and Poland. The situation was complex in France, with a large Protestant minority emerging and the French Wars of Religion being fought for 36 years between 1562 and 1598.[8]

    As this all indicates, the religious map of Western and Central Europe became very complicated as a result of the Protestant Reformation. But it was even more complicated by further theological disputes. Lutheranism was a moderate form of Protestantism. More radical variants quickly emerged, such as the Anabaptists, a movement of Christians around north-western Germany who argued that baptism at birth was not valid and that true Christians needed to be baptized as adults. In the Swiss city of Geneva Jean Calvin established Calvinism or Reformed Protestantism which effectively argued for Christians to establish theocratic states.[9] Others like the Trinitarians questioned the traditional view of the Christian Trinity of god, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. In turn splinter groups emerged out of these moderate and radical branches of Protestantism. A form of Calvinism emerged in Scotland known as Presbyterianism in the 1550s and 1560s. This was the transplanted to Ireland through the Ulster Plantation in the seventeenth century.[10] A de-facto form of Lutheranism known as Anglicanism emerged in England, while more radical Protestants in the same country who favored Calvinism became known as the Puritans. Soon people began to migrate because of these religious conflicts and divisions.[11]

    Extent of migration caused by the Protestant ReformationExtent of migration caused by the Protestant Reformation

    File:Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, by William Halsall.jpg
    The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor

    If a country remained homogenously adherent to one branch of Christianity or the other, there was generally very little displacement or migration caused by it. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church continued to hold sway over nearly everyone in Italy, Spain and Portugal owing to the persecution of the Inquisition. Conversely, if the religious landscape of a particular state or country became highly divided, then there was generally a religious minority of which there were members who considered migration to a place where they could worship in freedom.[12]

    England is a good example. By the early seventeenth century, moderate Protestantism had been established as the state religion of England. In tandem a sizeable community of more radical Puritans had emerged. From 1620 onwards, when the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to New England, thousands of English Protestants who veered more towards Puritanism or even movements like the Baptists began crossing the Atlantic to live in the growing number of English colonies in North America.[13] When new Christian movements like the Quakers were founded in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, they eventually found a home in Pennsylvania in the 1680s. The proprietor of that colony, William Penn, also invited religious minorities such as the Mennonites to come from Germany to join their haven for religious radicals in and around Philadelphia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Over time, the English colonies alone welcomed tens of thousands of religious migrants from Europe who were moving because of the delayed impacts of the Protestant Reformation.[14]

    There were other examples elsewhere. The Protestant minority in France, known as the Huguenots, were granted freedom of worship via the Edict of Nantes in 1598 at the end of the French Wars of Religion, but this was revoked by King Louis XIV through the Edict of Fontainebleau. In response tens of thousands of Huguenots fled from France, settling in England, Ireland, the Dutch Republic and even in the Dutch Cape Colony in southern Africa.[15] Other examples included the movement of Protestants out of the lands of the Habsburgs in Austria to places like Bohemia, Hungary and even Transylvania in what is now Romania. Tens of thousands of Irish men and their families who continued to adhere to Roman Catholicism despite their country being conquered and colonized by British Protestants left for the continent and settled in Spain, France, Austria and the Low Countries where many of them rose to positions of prominence within the Bordeaux wine trade or the militaries of several Catholic powers. Ultimately hundreds of thousands of men, women and children moved around Europe or even further afield in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the religious divisions created by the Protestant Reformation.[16]

    Demographic impact of the Protestant ReformationDemographic impact of the Protestant Reformation

    File:Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.jpg
    The Edict of Fontainebleau

    The demographic impact of the Protestant Reformation was far greater than is often appreciated. Take, for example, the demographic makeup of Pennsylvania today. It is believed that 2.8 million people in the state, over 21% of the population of Pennsylvania, are German American, making it the state in the US which has the highest number of German Americans anywhere in the country. Not all of this is owing to the Protestant Reformation and the movement of groups like the Moravians and Anabaptists to the region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most are there because of the mass migration of people from the German Empire to the United States between the 1870s and the 1900s. But these later waves of migrants were drawn to Pennsylvania because there was already a pre-existing German community there owing to the Protestant Reformation migration. There has, after all, been a town called Germantown in Pennsylvania since the 1680s.[17]

    This is just one example of the myriad ways in which the Protestant Reformation changed the demography of various parts of the world. Similar examples could be found in New England, the Netherlands, various parts of Germany, southern Africa, or even in small communities of French Huguenots living in Britain and other parts of Europe after the Edict of Fontainebleau. There were even knock-on effects occurring as late as the 1900s when the Boers migrated to Argentina to avoid living under British rule in southern Africa after the Second Boer War.[18] Thus, tens of millions of people worldwide today will have an ancestor who migrated to one part of the world or another because of the religious conflicts and tensions that erupted as a result of the Protestant Reformation.

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Protestant ReformationExplore more about the Protestant Reformation

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Protestant_Reformation/
    2. ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/what-caused-protestant-reformation-16th-century/
    3. ↑ https://sb.rfpa.org/the-lollards-brief-legacy-of-john-wycliffe/
    4. ↑ https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/jan-hus-1369-1415-and-the-hussite-wars-1419-1436/
    5. ↑ Hans-Martin Barth, The Theology of Martin Luther: A Critical Assessment (Augsburg, 2013).
    6. ↑ https://historiska.se/en/explore-history/history-hub/gustav-vasa-and-the-reformation/
    7. ↑ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/the-english-reformation-c1527-1590/
    8. ↑ https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-eight-wars-of-religion-1562-1598/
    9. ↑ https://iep.utm.edu/john-calvin/
    10. ↑ Philip S. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British settlement in an Irish landscape, 1600-1670 (Belfast, 1984).
    11. ↑ Brad Gregory, 'The Radical Reformation', in Peter Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the Reformation (Oxford, 2022).  
    12. ↑ https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/protestantism-in-italy-and-spain/
    13. ↑ https://www.mayflower400uk.org/education/the-mayflower-story/
    14. ↑ https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-history/1681-1776.html
    15. ↑ https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-edict-of-fontainebleau-or-the-revocation-1685/
    16. ↑ Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006).
    17. ↑ https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/german-population-by-state
    18. ↑ David Fig, ‘Proletarianisation or Patagonia: Reassessing the rationale for the Afrikaner migration to Argentina, 1902–6’, in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1991), pp. 103–125.


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    Dr. David Heffernan. (2025, November 22). *Protestant Reformation*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Protestant_Reformation