Reformation

A student before a reformer

Martin Luther enrolled at the University of Erfurt in 1501. He completed his bachelor’s examination in 1502 and became a master of arts in 1505. These dates place his education within the university established in the late medieval city, before the religious upheavals associated with his later career. 1

The university’s history gives a useful starting point for reading Luther’s Erfurt years. His connection with the city began in an existing institution of learning. Erfurt was already a place where students, teachers and religious communities pursued intellectual work; its importance did not begin with its most famous student.

The medieval chapter introduces that setting through the university’s foundation and the city’s commercial and religious institutions. Following the chronology forwards helps keep the young student distinct from the reformer he would become.

Entering the Augustinian Monastery

On 17 July 1505, Luther entered the Augustinerkloster, the Augustinian Monastery. Its own chronology places his years there between 1505 and autumn 1511. The institution was already centuries old: construction of the monastery began in 1277, and the church and convent buildings were erected by the middle of the fourteenth century. 2

These dates change how the place can be approached. Luther entered a community with an established institutional and architectural history. The monastery was part of his formation, rather than a building created to commemorate a reformer.

When reading a historical site, it is worth separating the period in which someone lived there from the later uses that made it a place of memory. The monastery’s recorded changes provide that longer perspective.

Preaching and conflict in the city

Luther returned to preach in Erfurt as a reformer in 1521. The diocesan history identifies this visit within the changes that would separate Protestant and Catholic religious life in the region. 3

Religious debate was also entangled with disputes over authority. Erfurt remained under the lordship of the Archbishop of Mainz; it was not a free imperial city. The scholarly introduction to the Treaty of Hammelburg describes tensions between inhabitants, clergy and council. In June 1521, the disturbances known as the Pfaffensturm included the destruction of church furnishings and relics. The council sought to limit clerical privileges while also containing disorder. 4

A narrative centred only on preaching would miss those struggles over institutions and property. Belief mattered, but it was expressed in a city whose inhabitants and governing bodies had different interests and unequal powers.

Negotiating religious coexistence

The conflicts intensified during the upheavals of 1525. The historical introduction to the Hammelburg agreement describes attacks on the symbols and property of Mainz’s authority, the expulsion of Catholic clergy and the suppression of their worship. The council subsequently allowed Catholic worship and clergy to return as it sought to preserve civic unity and autonomy. 4

The Treaty of Hammelburg in 1530 addressed the disputes between the city, its clergy and the Archbishop of Mainz. It belongs to a history of political negotiation as well as religious change. 4

The Diocese of Erfurt presents the agreement as enabling Catholic and Protestant confessions to exist alongside one another. This was an arrangement within a particular sixteenth-century political setting. It should not be read as a statement of modern, universal religious freedom. 3

Buildings acquire new purposes

Change also appears in the monastery’s institutional history. Prior Johannes Lang and other monks left in 1522. The Protestant St John’s congregation took possession of the Augustinian church in 1525. After the last monk died in 1556, the city secularised the monastery in 1559; a Protestant municipal grammar school was established in parts of the complex in 1561. 2

These successive uses make the architecture a record of decisions about worship, education and ownership. They also show why the Reformation cannot be reduced to a single date when a whole city changed its beliefs.

Following the city beyond Luther

Erfurt’s Reformation brings several histories into focus: a student’s education, a monastic community, public religious conflict and agreements governing life together. Keeping these strands connected gives the buildings more meaning than a sequence of biographical landmarks alone.

Continue to Transformation for the later changes in political rule, production and the shape of the city. For the wider regional setting, the Thuringia chapter follows the distinction between cultural connections and changing territorial boundaries.