ERETICOPEDIA

Dictionary of Heretics, Dissidents, and Inquisitors in the Mediterranean World
Edizioni CLORI | Firenze | ISBN 978-8894241600 | DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1309444
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Martin Luther (Eisleben, 10 November 1483 – Eisleben, 18 February 1546), a theologian who belonged to the Order of the Hermit Augustinians, was the initiator of the Protestant Reformation. The term Lutheranism refers to the body of Luther’s doctrines and those of his followers and to the phenomenon of their diffusion, which spread particularly rapidly from the 1520s onwards not only in the German and Northern European areas, but also in the Mediterranean world, especially in Italy and Spain (whereas France was rather a battleground conquered by Calvinism). It called into question Catholic and papal hegemony and triggered the repressive response of the Inquisition.

Biographical Notes on Martin Luther

Family and Education

Descending from a family of peasants and the first-born son of a miner who had risen in status, Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, in Thuringia, on 10 November 1483. In 1497–98 he studied in Magdeburg with the Brothers of the Common Life. In 1498 he was sent to Eisenach. In 1501 he enrolled at the University of Erfurt, where he obtained the baccalaureate and the degree of magister artium. He had just embarked on legal studies that promised better earnings when, suddenly, after escaping a thunderstorm on 2 July 1505, he decided to become a friar, entering the convent of the Observant Hermit Augustinians of Erfurt on 17 July 1505. For Melanchthon this decision was caused by Luther’s grief over the death of a friend. It was probably also a reaction against his father’s pressure that he take up a more lucrative profession, abandoning humanistic studies. He continued his theological studies at the Studium attached to his convent. In April 1507 he was ordained a priest. In 1508 he was transferred to Wittenberg, where, at the university, under the supervision of Johann von Staupitz, vicar general of his order in Germany, he began to teach and continued his studies. The following year, however, he returned to Erfurt. Between the end of 1510 and the beginning of 1511 he stayed in Rome, sent there to present his monastery’s protest against the union between the Observant and Conventual Augustinians. In October 1512 he obtained the doctorate in theology at Wittenberg, succeeding Staupitz in the chair of Holy Scripture. He meanwhile began to elaborate the first nuclei of his theology, attested by the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–16) and by the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans (1515–16).

The Clash with Rome and the Beginnings of the Reformation

In 1516 Luther began to preach against indulgences, in reaction to the preaching of the Dominican Johann Tetzel, whom the archbishop of Mainz, Albert of Hohenzollern, had tasked with promoting Pope Leo X’s indulgence in search of funds to finance the construction of St Peter’s Basilica. Against the doctrine of indulgences Luther drew up the famous 95 Theses (Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum), made public on 31 October 1517. A highly formal and academic gesture that in itself did not mean any “break” with the Church, it was nevertheless destined to unleash an uproar: the Theses had great resonance in the German world; Luther himself sent them to Albert of Hohenzollern and the latter, impressed and alarmed by the phenomenon, forwarded them to Rome, whence came the order to silence the protesting monk. The new general of the Augustinians, Gabriele Della Volta, set to work as soon as he received instructions in February 1518, but in vain. The following April, at the order’s general chapter held in Heidelberg, Luther won fresh and ever stronger support. Silvestro Mazzolini, the Master of the Sacred Palace, intervened against the German monk with the Dialogus de potestate papae. Johannes Eck also took a stand against the Lutheran theses. In August Luther therefore received, together with Mazzolini’s text, the order to go to Rome within 60 days to justify himself, whereupon he asked to be judged in Germany. Protected by Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, he appeared in Augsburg before Cardinal Tommaso de Vio (called Cajetan) and was examined by him between 12 and 14 October 1518. Refusing to recant, he was released from his vows by Staupitz. At this point Luther appealed to a council. In July 1519 the Leipzig disputation took place: Luther and Carlstadt on one side, Eck on the other. Meanwhile, pressure from Rome on the prince-elector of Saxony to abandon Luther to his fate mounted. This did not happen. On 15 June 1520 Leo X promulgated the bull Exsurge Domine, granting Luther 60 days to recant under pain of excommunication. Meanwhile orders were given to burn the reformer monk’s works in Italy and Germany. Luther’s response consisted of the three great treatises that laid the foundations of the Reformation: An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung (To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of the Christian Estate); De captivitate babylonica ecclesiae praeludium (Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church); Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (On the Freedom of a Christian). On 10 December Luther also publicly burned the bull Exsurge Domine together with the Corpus iuris canonici, a symbol of the authority of the Roman Church. On 3 January 1521 Leo X consequently thundered the excommunication (bull Decet Romanum Pontificem). Luther was then summoned to appear at the Diet of Worms before Charles V. He stood before the Emperor on 17 April 1521, again refusing to recant. Leaving Worms while the edict banning him from the Empire was in preparation, on 4 May 1521 Luther was seized by a band of knights in the service of Frederick the Wise—now determined to save him at all costs—and taken to safety in the Wartburg Castle. In this seclusion he undertook the translation of the New Testament into German (published on 21 September 1522; the translation of the entire Bible, a slower and more laborious task, appeared only in 1534) and maintained constant correspondence with his followers. He also drafted the De votis monasticis iudicium. In March 1522 Luther was able to return to Wittenberg, where in April of the following year he had several nuns in flight, among them Katharina von Bora—who later became his wife (they married in June 1525)—housed in his old Augustinian convent, by then emptied.

The Knights’ and Peasants’ Revolts

Meanwhile revolts broke out, fomented by those who took Luther’s ideas to their extreme consequences: first—the Knights’ War of 1522–23—led by Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten; then—the Peasants’ War of 1524–25—led by Carlstadt and Thomas Müntzer. In both cases, and especially in the second, Luther intervened forcefully to decry the uprisings. In March 1523 he published Von welltlicher Uberkeytt, wie weyt man yhr Gehorsam schuldig sey (On Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed), exhorting the knights to obedience to the princes. In 1525 he published the Ermanunge zum frieden auff die zwelf artikel der Bawrschafft (Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia) and two extremely harsh writings against the revolting peasants: Widder die hymelischen propheten (Against the Heavenly Prophets) and Wider die räuberischen und mörderischen Rotten der Bauern (Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants).

Erasmus vs. Luther

In 1523 Erasmus broke his composed neutrality regarding the Luther affair and began working on a work aimed at striking the core of Lutheran theology, which denied the possibility that man could do good without grace. The Dutch humanist published the De libero arbitrio in Basel in September 1524. While appealing to the authority of the Church and to Scripture, Erasmus’s work was the ultimate defense of Humanism, which placed man at the center of the world and made him faber suae fortunae. Luther immediately set to work diligently on a refutation of Erasmus’s text, but events connected with the Peasants’ War slowed him down. The De servo arbitrio was printed in December 1525 and was perhaps Luther’s masterpiece.

Towards Old Age and Death

The break with Rome (together with the alliance between the Reformation and the German princes for anti-Roman and anti-imperial purposes) had now been accomplished, and the foundations of Lutheran theology were in place. From this point on, although continuing to play an important role of reference, Luther progressively withdrew from the main stage, aiding the ecclesiastical organization from a distance, leaving ample room for his followers (particularly Melanchthon, who drafted the Confessio Augustana, presented by the Protestant princes to Charles V in 1530) and in fact assigning to secular authority the role of patron and protector of the reformed Church. He intervened punctually in various internal disputes within the Protestant movement and completed his translation of the Bible. Luther’s last major work, published in 1539, was the Von den Konziliis und Kirchen (On Councils and the Church). He died on 18 February 1546.

Luther’s Theology

Martin Luther did not intend his theological speculation to produce a confessional separation from Rome, but rather to carry out a process of reform within Christianity and the universal Church. It was a reform that certainly moved in the wake of the Augustinian tradition to which Luther belonged, but one that was based essentially on Scripture.
The guide and interpretive support for the Gospel of Christ were the pastoral letters of the apostle Paul, from whom most of the theological lexicon used by Luther derives.
One cannot disregard the cultural context in which the Reformation was born: the Germanic Renaissance, philology and thus a new approach to the written text; the increasingly insistent coupling of faith and reason, spirit and matter, up to more complex binomials that involve the human being in his entirety: «simul iustus et peccator».
Lutheran theology—understood in this sense as the elaboration of the theologian of Erfurt and not in the polemical sense used in the years immediately following the papal condemnation—has the merit, as Dieter Kampen affirms, of having placed Christ back at the center during a segment of the great historical trajectory in which man had placed himself as the pivot of existence¹.
The sociological and political implications of which the Reformation process is deemed the mother are in reality an indirect consequence and, in any case, not contemplated by Martin Luther.
Below we briefly analyze the principles on which the Reformation was founded and the theological outcomes that cemented the bases and differences with Catholic principles and theology.

The extra nos, the communicatio idiomatum and the Deus revelatus

The first principles of Lutheranism clarify the relationship between God and man, setting as the first discriminating element the role of Christ as the sole mediator of grace.
The concept of grace was not an innovation introduced by Luther; however, he sought to correct the internal conduct of the Roman Church, according to which grace, granted by God, enables man to ascend toward Him. Grace was thus dispensed materially—or rather “earned” by the believer—through the sacraments mediated by the ordained ministers of the Church or through good works. It is in this context that Luther’s critique of indulgences develops.
Hence the meaning of the principle extra nos: the righteousness of God is not measured by the works we perform; we have no part in attaining salvation. The Christian’s salvation lies outside himself, that is, in Christ. There is no path by which a human being can ascend to God; rather, it is God who descends toward man. The Christian cannot therefore measure his salvation according to merit; he can only believe it through faith² .
From the moment man is united with Christ in Christ himself, he shares in His saving work accomplished on the cross, where, with sin and death overcome, the liberation of creation has begun: this cosmological operation, which lies at the basis of justification, overlooks nothing that exists³ .
Accordingly, with the communicatio idiomatum, rendered in German as «der fröhliche Wechsel», the joyful exchange, one explains the justifying action of which Christ is the subject and man the object, when the Lord takes upon himself man’s sin in order to clothe him with His righteousness before God. This comes about through faith, a justifying faith that makes man righteous although in a state of inalienable sin⁴ .
The God whom man cannot reach by his own strength is that God whom human nature cannot comprehend because of His justice: man poses to himself questions such as the origin of evil and immediately clashes with the image of a cruel God who shows no partiality.
Yet this is the hidden God, the one we cannot comprehend with our rationality. If we know God, we can do so in Jesus Christ who revealed Him. The Deus revelatus is the God of love: there are thus no answers to evil, illness and catastrophes that befall man, but faith in the God of Jesus Christ will reveal to man the love of which His essence is constituted⁵ .

What Suffices: sola Scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria

The centrality of Holy Scripture in the whole Lutheran theological system lies in the Gospel itself: «et Verbum caro factum est»⁶ . If Christ is the cause of our salvation, the preaching of his good news must be at the center of proclamation. Everything happens through the Word: creation, faith, the free communication of God to man in Christ⁷ . From the church of the sanctifying sacrament to the church of the Word, which is a relationship of faith.
Since Luther maintains that man cannot be holy (ascending toward God) but a believer (God descending toward man), the Word is lived by the Christian in his whole anthropological reality «coram Deo», before God: the charge leveled against Lutheranism of intellectualizing the Word through study and the historical-critical approach—already introduced in part by Luther himself—is unfounded if one considers the totality of the Word in the life of the Church: it edifies the Christian, the community, and the sacraments⁸ .
As already stated, trust in the promises of Christ’s proclamation, entrusted to the words of Holy Scripture, is given to the believer by Christ himself: through Him the believer is declared righteous by God. There is no work, no merit that can advance claims before God. But good works are the fruit of salvation insofar as the Holy Spirit makes man ever more like Christ.
In the Letter of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians it is written: «For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your doing; it is the gift of God»⁹ . This passage of Scripture again explains how grace descends from God to man and how he, undeservedly, is saved. And this grace is given to us only through Christ: «for there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human»¹⁰ . Therefore neither the Virgin Mary—whom Catholicism grants hyperdulia, an even greater form of veneration—nor the saints are mediators; nor are the sacraments of the church, bound to the ordained ministry of priests and bishops.
This is why to God alone belongs the glory, and to Christ who is seated at His right hand and enjoys divine sonship in the Trinity. No one—not even the Lord’s mother—may be idolized, not even the civil authorities, who indeed see their power descend by divine legitimation. «God also highly exalted [Christ] and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father»¹¹ .

Some Practical Applications: Ecclesiology and Sacramental Theology

What has been said thus far becomes the basis for understanding some practical applications that theological reflection on the principles and foundations of Lutheranism had in structuring the Lutheran church.
Let us first reiterate that Luther did not intend to found a new church; rather, his action of theological, ecclesiological, and moral reform moved in the wake of the tradition of the Church “unam, sanctam et catholicam”. He therefore set out to oppose what he regarded as contrary to the Gospel of Christ.
A first reflection that broke with the Roman Catholic tradition was to reaffirm that Christ is the sole mediator of God’s grace and that, thanks to Him, every believer has a direct relationship with God. By virtue of baptism and faith, the Christian shares in the universal priesthood of all believers. Every believer is an irreplaceable part of the body of Christ, of which He is the head. The presence of ministers of worship, pastors, and bishops is given in a functional and organizational sense, where a collegial (synodal) and democratic dimension prevails¹² .
Luther did not reject the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas that, from the earliest centuries, had been the object of Christian theological reflection and of the councils of the Church (on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the afterlife—albeit with some reservation about Purgatory—life after death, the Parousia, the eschatological judgment…), increasingly taking the form of truths of faith based on Scripture rather than dogmas sanctioned de auctoritate by the Roman pontiff¹³. This is why Luther questioned certain scholastic-age dogmas, such as Transubstantiation (though not, of course, the Eucharist).
On this point Luther affirmed that the valid sacraments—not so much because they mediate grace, as in Catholicism, but because they are effective signs of what they represent and to what they refer—were Baptism and the Eucharist, because they are supported by Scripture, and, only in part, Reconciliation: the presupposition of their validity is the believer’s subjective intention, failing which they are invalid.
Whereas Baptism, performed in the Holy Trinity, incorporates the believer into the Church thanks to the faith by which Christ has drawn him, the Eucharist is the memorial of the Last Supper in the communal “divine service” (Gottesdienst), reformulated by Luther on the model of the pre-Tridentine Mass in the Formula Missae of 1523 (subsequently called Deutsche Messe in 1526).
The theological principle that seeks to describe in metaphysical terms the nature of the Eucharist is “consubstantiation”: this means that at the moment of consecration the bread and wine retain their physical nature and also become the substance of the body and blood of Christ¹⁴ .
This position, defended by Luther in the theological disputes on the Eucharist, stood opposed both to transubstantiation as elaborated by scholastic Aristotelianism and upheld by Catholicism, and to the commemorative understanding present in other Reformed confessions.
Reconciliation, or “private confession,” is not a sacrament but the possibility granted to the believer to proclaim, before a minister, the forgiveness received from God.
Ultimately, as Dieter Kampen again affirms, Lutheranism, by virtue of its Christocentrism, retains at its core an ecumenical vocation, which makes it difficult to think of it as a confession of Christianity rather than as continuity with the tradition of the Church of the origins¹⁵ .

Luther in the Mediterranean World

While the Reformation took hold with great ease in the territories of Northern Europe, thanks to the action of the princes who converted to it, it nevertheless had, for some decades, a significant impact in the territories of Southern Europe, where papal influence was stronger. If it failed, in Italy as in Spain, it was mainly because, from a certain point onward and for different reasons, it lost any political support. In the Italian peninsula the turning point came with the establishment and gradual affirmation of the “new” Inquisition, which also meant the defeat of the “spiritual” prelates who did not exclude a dialogue with the Protestants. In Spain the turning point came during the twilight years of Charles V’s imperial dream, when, with the approach of Philip II’s succession, the inquisitorial party regained strength, crushing the party of critics, humanists, and “spirituals” representing the Spain of the three cultures. In France, where the Reformation was essentially Calvinist and could afford open and powerful political and military support that it never had in Italy and Spain, it was another story. Religious conflict exploded suddenly, shortly after the accidental death of Henry II (1559), plunging the country into a catastrophic war of religion that lasted for decades, while in Spain and in the Italian peninsula the problem of religious dissent had by then been definitively overcome thanks to a ruthless and effective repression.

Luther in Italy

It is entirely inaccurate to claim—as was done by the author of the brief entry “Lutheranism (Italy)” in the Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione edited by Adriano Prosperi—that, despite recognition by both sympathizers and inquisitors of Luther’s “primacy” in the spread of the new religious ideas, “such basic recognition […] rarely corresponded to an effective knowledge of his theological message,” and that “ignorance of the figure and thought of the reformer prevailed.” Equally inaccurate, and indeed naïve, are observations such as the following: “The watchful inquisitorial vigilance that was stretching over the Peninsula in those years meant that, in the vernacular, only one work appeared under the name of the reformer of Wittenberg, and a brief and occasional one at that, the Exhortation to the Council. Other writings by Luther were published under less compromising names, such as those of Erasmus or Cardinal Federico Fregoso, before the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index definitively strangled even this underground circulation”¹⁶. The writer proves ignorant of the fact that Luther published a good portion of his most important works—suffice it to mention the 95 Theses, the De babylonica captivitate and the De servo arbitrio—in Latin, a language accessible to the educated classes (and, in general, to members of the clergy) of the time, and that they were not lacking in the bookshops of the peninsula; thus any Venetian patrician, Roman nobleman, or prelate (even of low social extraction) could, from the very beginnings of the Reformation, easily procure these texts in their original editions, which did not conceal the authorship of the reforming monk. These texts certainly circulated among Luther’s Italian confreres and among members of other religious orders: it is no coincidence that the preaching of the Conventual Franciscans belonging to the “accursed brood” denounced by Gian Pietro Carafa in his Venetian memorial to Clement VII of 1532 was clearly oriented in a Lutheran sense. On behalf of a pro-Lutheran Franciscan preacher active in the Venetian Republic, Baldo Lupetino of Albona, forced into long imprisonment (and executed only in 1556), Luther himself intervened in person, by then old and near death, asking the Saxon prince John Frederick to intercede for his release, later entrusting Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Lupetino’s own nephew, with carrying on the vain negotiations.
This last affair unfolded at a time when the Lutheran wave in Italy was already ebbing. From the 1530s onward repression became increasingly harsh, all the more so with the reorganization of the inquisitorial apparatus and the establishment of the Congregation of the Holy Office in 1542, which led to the progressive decline of Italian Protestantism.
By then, however, the Italian Reformation had acquired its very particular physiognomy, above all because of the powerful overlapping of Luther’s message with that of Juan de Valdés, who began his Neapolitan teaching in the latter half of the 1530s. Particularly significant is the definition of Luther by the Valdesian Pietro Carnesecchi as “the ocean […] de cuius plenitudine accepissent all the other heretics.” A very vague definition, given under interrogation by a figure who had received the new religious ideas through Valdés’s teaching which, while presenting points in common, was something quite different from Luther’s.

This does not alter the fact that the German monk’s affaire caused a great stir in Italy from its explosion in 1517. The central nuclei of Lutheran thought were well known and pondered by the first sympathizers of the Reformation in Italy and were often received with passion and surprising awareness by adherents to the Reformation from the humblest classes. Examples of pro-Lutheran preaching are documented from the very dawn of the Reformation: one of the first, attested by the Diarii of Marino Sanuto, occurred in Venice at Christmas 1520, when the Augustinian friar Andrea Baura of Ferrara preached from a balcony against the pope and the Roman Curia before an enormous crowd gathered in Campo Santo Stefano, according to the “doctrina di fra Martin Luther, homo doctissimo, qual seguita San Paulo et è contrario al Papa molto”¹⁷. Protest against papal corruption was the first aspect to capture attention. This went hand in hand with the call for a purer, more authentic religion, the search for a more intimate relationship with fewer intermediations with God, the contestation of a rigid and despotic ecclesiastical hierarchy. Anti-papalism and anti-clericalism were widely diffused among the greatest intellectuals of the peninsula contemporary with the German monk. If, for example, Machiavelli was fascinated by that German world from which the reforming monk came, which reminded him of the civic and religious virtues of the ancient Romans, and deplored the poor education that the corrupt and lax Roman Church had given to the peoples of the peninsula, then the almost pro-Lutheran outburst of Francesco Guicciardini is famous: “I have always naturally desired the ruin of the ecclesiastical State, and fortune has willed that there were two popes such that I was forced to desire and strive for their greatness. If it were not for this regard, I would love Martin Luther more than myself, because I would hope that his sect might ruin, or at least clip the wings of, this criminal tyranny of the priests”¹⁸. In light of these not uncommon positions it seems senseless to assert that “the anti-papal aggressiveness and angry tone of some of the ex-Augustinian’s writings jarred the sensibilities of many figures of humanist formation”¹⁹. Anti-clericalism and anti-papalism were widely diffused in the intellectual world of the peninsula well before Luther’s appearance, even if it is certainly true that, while sharing his critical tone against the corruption of the Papacy and the hierarchical system of the Church, several Italian “reformers,” particularly those belonging to the circle of the “spirituals” gathered around Cardinals Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone, would have preferred to reform the Church from within and not break cleanly with Rome: on this specific point, but only on this one, Luther could indeed be accused of arrogance and imprudence by some of his potential supporters in Italy.
Equally fascinated by the doctrinal content of Lutheran thought were people of very humble status. There were expectations of another kind, less “political” and more intimate—though not without gathering up needs and hopes of social redemption. At the height of the advance of the new religious ideas in the territories of the Serenissima, a certain Franceschina of the San Pantaleon district of Venice showed that she had so internalized precise doctrinal contents of Reformation thought that she addressed these words to her neighbors: “It is a bad thing to go to mass, because Christ did not ordain it. It is in the Old Testament that when the golden calf was raised, everyone rushed to adore it and followed that idol. So we, when the consecrated host is raised, run to adore it, having faith in that calf, and we are lost, for it is an idol… And we must pray to God, because he is the principal… And Christ must be adored in spirit and truth, not in that piece of dough… And he is our purgatory, and when we die we go to paradise or to hell.” Only one case among many, though a particularly suggestive one, that of Franceschina. Evidently both preaching and the circulation of crypto-Lutheran texts—already in 1525 an anthology of Lutheran writings published in Venice without an author’s name by the printer Nicolò d’Aristotile Rossi, called Zoppino (in the 1526 reprint the texts were attributed to Erasmus of Rotterdam)—had borne fruit.

Luther in Spain

It is not easy to define a specific Spanish Lutheranism, all the more so since Luther’s message penetrated a context already particularly complex from a religious point of view, in which the Spain of the three cultures (Arab, Christian, and Jewish) continued to resist in the face of the emergence of the new Spain politically and religiously unified by the Inquisition, and in which, as highlighted by the classic studies of Marcel Bataillon, Erasmianism had found particularly fertile ground. It seems unconvincing to regard 1492—the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Iberian soil and of the fall of the last Arab stronghold in the peninsula, Granada—as a decisive and definitive turning point, since, even though the diaspora was important, the edict of expulsion did not concern the conversos, whose number was increased by many new conversions dictated by the expediency of the moment. Even less correct—and downright hazardous—does it seem to see in the sad events of 1492 the “seed” of new forms of intolerance on a racial basis that led to the antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries and to the Holocaust, as Adriano Prosperi has done in a recent little book, certainly alluring but unconvincing²⁰. Under the long reign of Charles V, from 1516 king of Spain and from 1519 emperor, the inquisitorial mesh loosened considerably, and this allowed the various forces opposing the Inquisition (alumbrados, moriscos, conversos, humanists of various tendencies) to catch their breath. From this loosening of inquisitorial control the penetration and expansion of Luther’s message in Spain could benefit, which in this case overlapped with the heterodox orientations already widespread in the peninsula; conversely, in Italy, Valdesianism—heir to the alumbradismo—which spread from its Neapolitan base from the mid-1530s, overlapped the penetration of the Lutheran message. The first burning at the stake for “Lutheranism” took place in Majorca in 1523: the condemned was a painter and it seemed an isolated case. The penetration of Luther’s works in Spain alerted the Inquisition from the early 1520s. But only from the late 1530s did inquisitorial repression intensify significantly. It should be recalled that from 1523 to 1538 the inquisitor general of Spain was Alonso Manrique de Lara, a “moderate” and an Erasmian, who had himself succeeded the humanist Adrian Florensz of Utrecht (Adrian VI); this contributed to making the repressive activity of the Inquisition much milder than in Torquemada’s years. In the 1530s, trials against heterodox figures brought together charges of alumbradismo, Erasmianism, and Lutheranism: this was the case both in the trial against Juan de Vergara, canon of Toledo and professor at the University of Alcalá, arrested in 1533 and condemned in 1535, and in the trials of 1537 against Alonso Ruiz de Virués, preacher at the court of Charles V, and Pedro de Lerma, canon of Burgos. In 1540 came the burning of Francisco de San Román, in whose trial the charges of Lutheranism were stronger and more circumstantial (but he was a young merchant who had traveled abroad, particularly in the German territories). From the late 1540s the inquisitorial party, led by Juan Martínez Silíceo, archbishop of Toledo (elevated to the cardinalate by Paul IV in 1555), and by Fernando de Valdés, archbishop of Seville and inquisitor general of Castile from 1548, grew ever stronger. But the struggle with the anti-inquisitorial party, whose point of reference was Bartolomé Carranza, who succeeded Silíceo as archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, was uncertain until the last years of Charles V’s reign and the very first years of Philip II. In any case, from the mid-1540s the Spanish Inquisition began to take an interest in the heterodox foreigners present on Iberian soil (a problem that had a long course); among these many were French (Calvinists), but Germans and Flemings were not lacking, nor were Italians. In 1551 the Bibles of Valladolid and Salamanca were censured and the first index of the Spanish Inquisition was published.
In 1552 Juan Gil (better known as Doctor Egidio), canon of Seville, bishop of Tortosa, and a famous pro-Lutheran preacher long protected by Charles V, was forced to a harsh recantation. In the years that followed, persecution focused on his Sevillian followers. But the true “turning point,” which marked the collapse of Lutheranism in Spain as well as of what remained of the alumbrado and “spiritual” party, came very abruptly between autumn 1557 and autumn 1559. Various raids struck the Lutheran communities of Seville and Valladolid, many members of which were important exponents of the local élites, mostly of converso origin. The trials against the Lutherans of Seville and Valladolid, the spectacular autos-da-fé held in Valladolid’s Plaza Mayor on 21 May and 8 October 1559, and the arrest of Bartolomé Carranza on 22 August 1559, sealed the end of the brief Lutheran “adventure” in Spain and the definitive triumph of the inquisitorial party over the various forces that had opposed it in previous decades.

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Article written by Daniele Santarelli & Vincenzo Vozza | Ereticopedia.org © 2013 | English version 2025

et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ictos
invidia inter dum contemptim in Tartara taetra
invidia quoniam ceu fulmine summa vaporant
plerumque et quae sunt aliis magis edita cumque
[Lucretius, "De rerum natura", lib. V]