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The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation and the European Reformation, [1] was a major theological movement or period or series of events in Western Christianity in 16th-century Northwestern Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the papacy and the authority of the Catholic Church.
In the early 18th century, a regional group known as the Camisards (who were Huguenots of the mountainous Massif Central region) rioted against the Catholic Church, burning churches and killing the clergy. It took French troops years to hunt down and destroy all the bands of Camisards, between 1702 and 1709.
Protestant Reformers were theologians whose careers, works and actions brought about the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. In the context of the Reformation, Martin Luther was the first reformer, sharing his views publicly in 1517, followed by Andreas Karlstadt and Philip Melanchthon at Wittenberg , who promptly joined the new movement.
Luther's pamphlets against the Church and the hierarchy, often worded with "liberal" phraseology, led many peasants to believe he would support an attack on the upper classes in general. [102] Revolts broke out in Franconia , Swabia , and Thuringia in 1524, even drawing support from disaffected nobles, many of whom were in debt.
The Knights' War of 1522 was a revolt by a number of Protestant and religious humanist German knights led by Franz von Sickingen, against the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor. It has also been called the "Poor Barons' Rebellion". The revolt was short-lived but would inspire the bloody German Peasants' War of 1524–1526.
Those early reformers influenced German friar Martin Luther, who spread the Protestant Reformation. Originally, Luther intended to reform the Roman Catholic Church rather than break it up. Reformation in Germany diversified quickly as did the earlier Hussites in Bohemian Crown, and other reform impulses arose independently of Luther.
The worldly excesses of the secular Renaissance church, epitomized by the era of Alexander VI (1492–1503), exploded in the Reformation under Pope Leo X (1513–1521), whose campaign to raise funds in the German states to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica by supporting sale of indulgences was a key impetus for Martin Luther's 95 Theses.
The Waldensians saw themselves as a "church within the Church", likely not going further, although they were accused of seeing the Catholic church as the Babylonian harlot. [ 36 ] The Waldensians would, later in their history, adopt a number of doctrines from the Reformed churches due to the French Reformer Guillaume Farel , who introduced ...