The Reformation
1517 O.S. – 164866 items
early modernreligionFrom Luther’s theses to the Peace of Westphalia
In 1517 a friar in a small Saxon university town questioned the sale of indulgences. Within a generation Western Christendom had split into Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist and a renewed Roman Catholic Church, and the quarrel had been fought out in print, in councils and on battlefields from Zurich to Prague. This timeline follows it for 131 years, to the treaties of 1648 that ended the last great war of religion in Germany.
Two calendars side by side
Everything before October 1582 is dated in the Julian calendar, which all of Europe then used. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform dropped ten days, and Catholic Europe went from Thursday 4 October to Friday 15 October 1582. Protestants would not take a calendar from the pope, so after 1582 each event is dated as the people who lived it wrote it: France, Spain, the Catholic Empire, Bohemia, Holland and the Southern Netherlands in the Gregorian calendar, and England, Scotland, Sweden and Protestant Germany in the Julian. The notes give the other calendar’s date where it matters.
So Gustavus Adolphus fell at Lützen on 6 November 1632 in his own Swedish calendar, the day Sweden still marks, and on 16 November in the imperial one. England also began its year on 25 March, so Cranmer was burned on “21 March 1555/6”; those dates are entered as the English wrote them, and Timescrolly places them in the right year.
How it is laid out
Periods: the Diet of Worms, the Peasants’ War, Anabaptist Münster, Calvin’s Geneva, the Council of Trent, the Schmalkaldic War, the Marian persecutions, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years’ War.
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lutheran,reformed,anabaptists,england,counter-reformation,scripture,persecution,war,diplomacyandcalendar.
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. — the first of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, 1517
Items
Luther’s Ninety-five Theses
Luther burns the papal bull
Luther refuses to recant at Worms
Luther’s September Testament
First Zurich Disputation
First adult baptisms in Zurich
Battle of Frankenhausen
Luther marries Katharina von Bora
Tyndale’s New Testament printed at Worms
Felix Manz drowned in the Limmat
The Protestation at Speyer
The Augsburg Confession
Zwingli killed at Kappel
Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy
Münster’s Anabaptist leaders executed
Calvin’s Institutes, first edition
William Tyndale executed at Vilvoorde
The pope approves the Society of Jesus
The Roman Inquisition founded
Luther dies at Eisleben
Trent decrees on Scripture and tradition
Trent’s decree on justification
Battle of Mühlberg
First Book of Common Prayer
Francis Xavier lands in Japan
Michael Servetus burned at Geneva
Peace of Augsburg
Latimer and Ridley burned at Oxford
Cranmer burned at Oxford
Elizabeth’s religious settlement
Scotland’s Reformation Parliament
The Iconoclastic Fury begins
St Bartholomew’s Day massacre
Act of Abjuration
Last day of the Julian calendar in Catholic Europe
First day of the Gregorian calendar
William of Orange assassinated
The Armada beaten off Gravelines
Henry IV abjures Protestantism
Edict of Nantes
Rudolf II’s Letter of Majesty
The King James Bible
Defenestration of Prague
Battle of White Mountain
The Mayflower Compact
Executions in Prague’s Old Town Square
Edict of Restitution
Gustavus Adolphus lands in Pomerania
Sack of Magdeburg
Gustavus Adolphus killed at Lützen
Peace of Münster
Peace of Westphalia