Massacre of the Vaudois at Merindol by Gustav Dore; Martyrdom of Saint Catherine by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Die Franzoe-Sachsen: The Huguenots and the Origins of the Saxon Religious Settlement.
from
Paper Realm: The Rise of Saxony, 1533-1676, by David X. Haller
The Reformation and the turmoil it unleashed was accompanied by suppression and violence on all sides. With only occasional exceptions, like the Reciprocal Concession between Saxony and Bohemia between 1534 and 1547, believers in traditionalist religious practice who found themselves under a reformer prince were enjoined to conform, likewise those practitioners with reformist inclinations within the territories of princes still obedient to Rome. And on both sides, where these believers refused or resisted, they frequently met the force of law, and worse, physical violence. Thus the age of the Reformation and the struggle it began is also an age of the movement of peoples, as believers on both sides of the divide left home in search of places where they could practice their faith free of outside coercion, and they would be protected by the local rulers rather than endangered by them.
As an initial consideration, we must understand what migration meant in this context. First, England, where feudal institutions had long been in decline, and Saxony, which with its free peasantry was so different from its neighbors like Brandenburg, were exceptions. In most of Europe at this time, certainly in most of the princely states of the Holy Roman Empire, there were classes of person bound to the land for whom the details of leaving, resettling and securing a new livelihood were only secondary problems. But beyond that, we must understand that life in the middle ages relied on local affiliations of family, church, estate, village, town, and, to those whom it applied, guild. Identity within these affiliations was no mere abstraction. In the world before a person's biography could be pulled up on a slate or their criminal records checked by the tap of a few keys, a person's character as it had been exhibited over the course of his or her whole life to those who knew him or her secured the means by which they lived in a shared community. Even for those conceivably legally entitled to move beyond their place of birth, the risk of leaping from the world of the known into the unknown, even for fear of one's life or immortal soul, must have been enormous.
For good reason then, the initial flows of persons across frontiers were slight. We must remember in the early days of the Reformation nobody imagined the situation as it was then would be permanent. Either a council of the church would resolve the dispute, or a compromise would be struck, or some catastrophe would render the matter moot, but no one thought they were living at the beginning of a permanent territorial division of Christianity into practitioners of different doctrines. So there was little reason, even for the Christian on the wrong side of a border with respect to his or her specific confession, to uproot themselves forever. This was even more the case since the princely states of the Holy Roman Empire were by no means static in their religious doctrine even once the struggle began in earnest. States like Saxony or Bavaria that chose a side and stayed consistent, we must remember, were the minority. Cologne, the Duchy of Saxony, the Electoral Palatinate, were all turned this way and that depending on the conscience of their rulers, those same rulers' calculations of the political winds within the empire, and even military force. Thus the hesitation to leave one's home was only reinforced: one had no real way of knowing how durable one's destination of choice would be as a refuge for one's particular faith. Even Saxony, the most secure destination for Lutherans seeking the freedom to practice their faith, must have seemed to many of the rural peasantry so memorably immiserated by the Duke of Alba in 1548 on the cusp of a reversion to the old ways.
Likewise, the first movements were not great treks. Saxony's partition into Ernestine and Albertine had occurred in the living memory of some of the elders still around when the Ernestine house followed Luther and the Albertine house chose the opposite path. Local kinship did not keep neatly to the borders the Wettins drew, and it was a relatively small matter for a Lutheran family fleeing the repression of Duke Georg to find themselves in the lands of the Elector Johann the Constant, or one of Johann's traditionally minded subjects to make their way to Leipzig or Dresden. Only gradually, as the conflict was progressively militarized and the militaries in question were turned on subject peoples to seal their obedience or send them packing, did longer distance columns of the newly landless make their way further afield in search of new beginnings.
The young elector Friedrich IV, whether out of a sympathy born from his early flirtation with Sacramentarian ideas or the broad-minded liberality with which he is associated, from early on expressed deep concern over the well-being of members of various Protestant sects outside Saxony. Despite the necessity of maintaining close and friendly relations with his uncle, Henry VIII of England, Friedrich expressed deep grief over the execution of William Tyndale in 1536. And from Charles V's 1539 suppression of the revolt of Ghent and the accompanying reinforcement of Catholic dominance in the Netherlands, Friedrich let it be known Electoral Saxony would welcome any Christian fleeing persecution in a land still loyal to Rome. This followed hard on the heels of his famous debate with Luther about the Jews, which had in itself scandalized much of Saxony. But more ominous still, it followed hard on the events at Muenster in 1537, which had served as a lesson to all the princes of the empire as to the danger to public order presented by uncompromising religious radicalism.
All the princes of the empire, that is, save Friedrich. Concern that his throwing open of the doors of Saxony so wide constituted a dangerous over-liberality was widespread. Certainly, the theologians of the Leucorea were deeply troubled. Luther, his ties to this elector never too strong, realized he could not intervene without pushing Friedrich the opposite direction. Thus it was left to the kindly, moderate Philip Melancththon to supplicate the elector that perhaps some brakes should be applied to his policy before every hare-brained zealot or penny-ante prophet in Europe made their way to his territory, promising immediate rapture and utopia.
The result was the Strangers' Law of 1541, much of which became an enduring part of the Saxon, and then the German, religious law, and some of which is even in force in the Second Realm even today. An in-depth examination of its terms is outside our scope, but fundamentally it established the rules governing the religious rights of (1) persons previously non-resident in the Saxon realm; (2) who are Christian; and who (3) stay outside the Lutheran Church once they reside in Saxony. Fascinatingly, enforcement of the Strangers' Law necessitated a system of professional investigators in the pay of the state. Thus it marked an important stage in the development of an internal state security apparatus in late-medieval Saxony.
To some extent though, the dye was cast before the Strangers' Law was passed. The first significant wave of new arrivals in Saxony who did not hail from neighboring princely states were from the Netherlands, and they were weighted heavily towards doctrinal innovation and idiosyncrasy. In 1543 the estates of Electoral Saxony, alarmed, petitioned Friedrich to limit the new arrivals to fellow Lutherans, and recommended what would be essentially a questionnaire to ensure homogeneity of belief between the existing Saxon Lutheran population and the immigrants. Friedrich's reply, really not even without a semblance of sincerity, was to promise that Lutherans would be accommodated first.
It was during this period though that the larger and more consequential mass-migration began. It is hard to underestimate just how closely the Elector Friedrich followed religious developments in the western empire, the Swiss Cantons and France in this period. In this case, a crude comparison of bulk is helpful. The collected letters exchanged between Friedrich IV and Luther take up a single volume, icy and impersonal on both sides. Melanchthon? Three volumes. Of course much communication could pass among these men in person, for much of the year unless he was at war Friedrich IV lived down the street from the Leucorea, but nonetheless his correspondence with the men who were formulating the doctrine according to which the spiritual life of his people would be conducted was slight. Now by contrast, Martin Bucer of Strassburg, and later of Cambridge? Six volumes. John Calvin, who arrived on the scene somewhat later than the rest? Seven volumes.
Of course, not all of this is Biblical explication, recollections of Karlstadt, or even mean-spirited gossip about Martin Luther. Perhaps at most only five hundred pages of the letters exchanged with Calvin have to do with that. Instead, from fairly early in his tenure as elector, Friedrich IV is interrogating his interlocutors in points west about the attitude of state authorities towards them where they are, what princes are repressive, and what are tolerant of or sympathetic towards, the evangelical project. And he is asking them to make known to their other correspondents that his realm is open to those who are in need of refuge. Now we have no doubt who was meant here by "other correspondents": the evangelical ministers in places like Languedoc, Lorraine and Savoy facing various degrees of official persecution.
What Friedrich was not willing to do on this point was to set his name directly on any papers that might cross into France and come into the hands of Francois I. In this case, as with Henry VIII and Tyndale, Friedrich, or more particularly, his military, was reliant on a flow of monetary assistance. Francois, even though he offered support for the evangelical German princes against Charles V, instigated a policy of ferocious bigotry at home. This is by the way quite likely not accidental: Francois aiding Protestantism abroad probably necessitated steps that would make sure none of his prelates or nobility understood him as having reformist inclinations himself, which if they had could have gravely destabilized his reign.
But for whatever reason, Francois I engaged in violence targeting non-Roman Catholic Christians generally and Lutherans specifically. Friedrich was sickened, and yet felt that even a direct protest to the French king, never one to take an insult lightly, would endanger his stipend and increase the risk to Saxony. In 1545 Friedrich received word of the massacre of the Waldensians of Merindol on Francois's order. Of course this coincided with the diplomatic rapproachment of France and the Holy Roman Empire that would serve as the preface to Charles V's campaign against the Lutheran princes. Thus the Saxon elector, both outraged, and seeing that he had little to lose from making his feelings on the matter known, commissioned from the Cranach workshop a monumental painting of the massacre. Comparable in its dimensions to Cranach's famously elaborate hunting scenes, it depicts the hellish abuses suffered by the Waldensians at the hands of the French. By the time it was completed, Friedrich himself was being held in Toledo at the behest of the emperor. His return to Wittenberg on the occasion of his mother's death, after two years of captivity and a third of desperate warfare, was the first time Friedrich saw the completed work.
Overcome by the result, he ordered
Das Gemetzel Bei Merindol hung in his throne room, behind his seat. It was of course an unusual choice, not evoking power, opulence or tradition. Instead, the Saxon Elector wanted to make sure no one addressing him failed to understand that the consequences of failure of the evangelical state's enterprise against Charles V were depicted there on the canvas. He wanted the violence of the scene to be constantly on the mind of those present, and he wanted them to understand it was constantly on his mind, the evil against which all his strategies, policies and campaigns were directed. It was not without diplomatic significance too: when the French ambassadors arrived in 1550 to invite Friedrich, or his representative, to negotiate a new alliance at Chambord, Friedrich did not hesitate to ask their opinions of the painting behind him.
Cranach's
Merindol--gargantuan, profane, harrowing--was of course propaganda. And Friedrich was a ruler who made use of propaganda with both bombast and sophistication. But here the message went deeper: Friedrich would no longer let maintaining good relations with France turn his head from what he saw as the duty of his conscience, and so the efforts that were previously covert, indirect, cautious, were now ostentatious and urgent. The word went to Geneva, and from Geneva to Bordeaux and Marseilles and Lyons: Saxony welcomed all those persecuted in the name of the Pope and the King of France.
Thus what had been a steady drip in the 1530s and a trickle in the 1540s became in the 1550s a flood. 30,000 French immigrants had settled in the lands of the elector by his death in 1560. Most were Huguenot followers of Calvin, though a sizable number were Lutheran, and there were also more than a few openly practicing Waldensians. Some settled, poetically enough, the lands that had been vacated by Catholics in the brief but violent repression of Duke Johann in 1547-9. Others made their homes in the villages and farms despoiled by the Duke of Alba in his nightmarish campaign of 1549. And of course the forests and mountains of northern Germany in this era did not lack for places where a hardworking family could clear a farm.
But, perhaps recognizing the safest place for themselves was in sight of the man friendliest to their cause in the whole realm, the largest site for Huguenot settlement was Wittenberg. By 1560 it was estimated that between three in ten and four in ten Wittenbergers spoke French at home. Simultaneously, the Huguenots brought with them their trades of silk-making, lace-making and weaving, creating a sudden boom in the domestic production of luxury goods in Saxony in general and in Wittenberg in particular. A town that in 1500 had been a few thousand people on a swampy island, with abundant space behind its thick walls, was now teeming with industry and trade and filled to the brim.
Of course, Saxony's economic and cultural benefit from the Huguenot influx of the mid-sixteenth century is well-recorded. Soon even the beloved Leucorea would be in competition with the city's well-funded and demanding Neue Franzoesische Schule for preeminence among the educational institutions of Wittenberg. But even that does not capture in full the transformation entailed by the Huguenot arrival.
For, you see, before Friedrich IV, Elector of Saxony was
der heilige prinz, he was
le saint prince. The idea that Saxony was the unique redoubt of evangelical Christendom, regardless of any specific creed, and its elector the protector of all the scattered churches united by their opposition to Rome and Rome's efforts to stamp them out, originated not in the Saxons. For them, Friedrich IV was always a bit too reckless, a bit too conniving, and a bit too strange, and truth be told many much preferred the genteel calm of life under his uncle. No, that fervor originated in the Huguenots, who quickly made themselves the special constituency of the Saxon electors. No campaign was announced against the Catholic powers without them making monetary contributions, unasked. No army was raised for service against an imperial threat without a rush of eager Huguenot volunteers. It even became the custom among some to have an extra son in the family to contribute to the army, called
la taxe du garcons. Such fervor might seem pathological to modern eyes, but it is best explained by the nickname for the Elector Friedrich IV the Huguenot immigrants preferred before even
le saint prince: the
protecteur contre torches.
