The Diet of Augsburg

Augsburg, a free imperial city · June 20 to November 22, 1530 · the most substantial assembly of the Holy Roman Empire between the Diet of Worms and the peace of Westphalia.

Charles V came to Augsburg to end the schism. He left having made it permanent.

The Diet is remembered chiefly for the document it produced, and rightly — the Augsburg Confession is treated in full elsewhere on this site. But the assembly itself is worth understanding on its own terms, because what happened at Augsburg over those five months settled the political shape of Protestant Europe: an emperor attempting to arbitrate doctrine, three rival confessions on his table, a deadline that could not be met, and a defensive league formed to resist it.

Which Diet of Augsburg? The imperial estates met at Augsburg many times, and four of those meetings matter for this history. In 1518 Cardinal Cajetan examined Luther there. In 1530 the evangelical estates presented their confession — the subject of this page. In 1547–48 a victorious Charles imposed the Augsburg Interim on the defeated Protestants. In 1555 the Peace of Augsburg settled the religious question with the formula that each territory would follow the religion of its ruler.


Why Charles Called It

Charles V had not set foot in Germany for nine years. He had left after the Diet of Worms in 1521 to fight France, to manage Spain and the Netherlands, and to deal with an Ottoman advance that had reached the walls of Vienna in 1529. In his absence the evangelical movement had spread across half of Germany, and the imperial ban on Luther had become unenforceable.

By 1530 his position had improved sharply. He had made peace with Francis I, come to terms with Clement VII, and turned back the Turks. In February at Bologna the pope crowned him — the last Holy Roman Emperor a pope would ever crown. From that position of strength he issued the summons, on January 21, 1530, calling the estates to Augsburg.

The tone of the summons was conciliatory, and deliberately so. Charles invited both sides to set out their opinions so that the differences might be heard and weighed in charity. His actual objectives were three: to restore religious unity in Germany, to secure the men and money for a campaign against the Turks, and to establish his own authority as an emperor now formally blessed by Rome. The three were connected. He could not raise a German army against the Ottomans while half of Germany expected him to march against it.

The Emperor Arrives

The Diet did not open until June 20, months later than the date named in the summons. The friction began before business did.

On the eve of the opening the emperor required the evangelical princes to take part in the Corpus Christi procession and to stop the preaching of their ministers in Augsburg. They refused the procession. On the preaching, a compromise was reached: neither side would preach except by imperial appointment. Before a word was debated, the fault line had already surfaced over what a Protestant prince could and could not do with his own conscience.

Luther was not present and could not be. He had stood under the imperial ban since 1521, and Augsburg lay outside Saxon protection. He waited out the whole Diet at the Castle of Coburg, roughly a hundred and fifty miles north, writing letters at a rate that exhausted his correspondents, while Melanchthon carried the burden in the hall.

Three Confessions, Not One

The most revealing fact about Augsburg is one that most summaries omit. Charles asked the evangelicals for a statement of their faith, and received three.

  1. The Augsburg Confession, presented June 25 by the Lutheran princes and two free cities, read aloud in German by the Saxon chancellor Christian Beyer
  2. The Tetrapolitan Confession, submitted by Strasbourg, Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau, which could not subscribe the Lutheran article on the Lord's Supper
  3. The Fidei Ratio, sent by Zwingli from Zurich on his own account, and read by almost no one

The division at Marburg the previous autumn had hardened into three separate documents laid before the same emperor in the same summer. Charles was being asked to arbitrate between Protestants who could not agree among themselves, and the Lutheran party had no interest in being associated with the Swiss. It is difficult to imagine a weaker negotiating position, and the evangelicals arrived in it by their own doing.

The Confutation and the Breakdown

Charles assigned a body of some twenty Roman theologians — Johann Eck, Johann Faber, Johannes Cochlæus, and Konrad Wimpina among them — to answer the Confession. Their first draft was so intemperate that the emperor sent it back. Five drafts later, the Confutatio Pontificia was read on August 3.

Charles declared the Confession refuted and required the evangelicals to submit. Melanchthon prepared a reply, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession; the Diet refused even to receive it. Negotiations by committee dragged through August and September and produced agreement on a number of articles and deadlock on the rest — the mass, the invocation of saints, monastic vows, communion in both kinds, and the authority of bishops.

By autumn it was clear that no formula would hold. The evangelical princes began leaving Augsburg before the Diet closed.

The Recess

The emperor and the Catholic estates signed the Recess — the document recording the Diet's decisions — on November 19, 1530.

It declared the Augsburg Confession refuted from Scripture, ordered the restoration of Catholic practice and of confiscated church property, and gave the evangelical estates until April 15, 1531, to conform. It also promised that a general council would be summoned within a year to settle the matter properly — a promise that took fifteen years to keep, and was kept at Trent, where no Protestant would appear.

Charles believed he had given a generous deadline. What he had actually done was set a date by which a large part of Germany had to decide whether to obey its emperor or its conscience.

What It Produced

They decided within three months. In February 1531 the evangelical princes and cities met at Schmalkalden and formed a defensive alliance against any attempt to enforce the Recess. Philip of Hesse and John Frederick of Saxony led it. Brunswick, Anhalt, Mansfeld, Magdeburg, Bremen, Strasbourg, and Ulm were among the first members.

The Schmalkaldic League changed the character of the Reformation. Until Augsburg the evangelical estates had been individual territories making individual decisions. After Augsburg they were a confederation with a treaty, a treasury, and an army, and the religious question in Germany had become a military one. The League protected the Protestant territories for sixteen years, until Charles destroyed it at Mühlberg in 1547 — and even that victory proved temporary, since the settlement he imposed collapsed and gave way to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.

One further thing came out of that winter. Faced with the Recess and refusing to compromise, the Elector John resolved to stand by the imperishable Word of God. Out of that season came Luther's setting of Psalm 46, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.

Magistrates as Arbiters of Doctrine

The Recess is a strange document, and historians have noticed how strange. It shows an emperor and a body of secular and spiritual princes acting as arbiters of religion, including doctrine — a role for which the imperial constitution made no provision, and which the medieval church would never have granted them.1

That is the thread connecting Augsburg to the rest of this section of the site. Seven years earlier a city council at Zurich had claimed the same competence and ruled the other way. What the Reformation did to the relationship between magistrate and church was not incidental to it; the question of who may settle a doctrinal dispute, and by what standard, runs underneath every assembly on this page.

At Zurich the council said Scripture would decide. At Augsburg the emperor said he had decided, and gave the losing party five months to comply. Both were magistrates adjudicating doctrine. Only one of them was willing to be bound by the rule he named.

Why It Matters

It gave Protestantism a public confession. Whatever else Augsburg accomplished, it forced the evangelical estates to say in orderly form what they believed, before the highest authority in Europe, at real risk. Every later Protestant confession stands in the space that document opened.

It ended the possibility of reunion by negotiation. Charles kept trying for another fifteen years, through further diets and colloquies. Augsburg is where the evidence first became conclusive that the two sides were not going to be talked back together.

It militarized the Reformation. The Schmalkaldic League is the direct consequence of the Recess, and everything from the Schmalkaldic War to the Peace of Augsburg follows from it.

It exposed the Protestant division. Three confessions from one movement, in one city, in one summer. The Lutheran and Reformed traditions were already separate churches in 1530, whatever anyone wished to call them.

Councils and Synods

Further Reading

  • The Recess of the Diet of Augsburg, 19 November 1530. German History in Documents and Images — the Recess in English translation, with an editorial introduction on the emperor and estates acting as arbiters of doctrine. The essential primary source for the Diet's outcome.
  • Bente, Historical Introduction to the Augsburg Confession. The fullest free account of the summons of January 21, 1530, the drafting at Augsburg, the presentation, and the Confutation.
  • Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7, The German Reformation. The narrative of the Diet, the reading of the Confession, and the negotiations that followed. In the public domain.
  • Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic). Good on why the three confessions could not be combined.
  • Charles P. Arand, Robert Kolb, and James A. Nestingen, The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of the Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012). The standard modern treatment of the Confession in its political setting.
  • Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2004). Sets Augsburg within the wider European politics of the 1530s.

Notes

  1. Editorial introduction to the Recess of the Diet of Augsburg, November 19, 1530, in German History in Documents and Images, noting that the Recess is noteworthy for showing the emperor and the estates in the untraditional and problematical role of arbiters of religion, including doctrine.

The summons of January 21, 1530, issued from Bologna, and the sequence of the presentation, the Confutation of August 3, and the refusal of Melanchthon's Apology, follow F. Bente, “Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books,” in Triglot Concordia (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921).

The dates of the Diet (June 20 to November 22, 1530), the deadline of April 15, 1531, and the founding of the Schmalkaldic League at Schmalkalden in February 1531 under Philip of Hesse and John Frederick of Saxony follow the standard accounts.

For the contents of the Augsburg Confession itself, and for Luther's part in it from the Coburg, see The Augsburg Confession (1530).