WI: Luther Martyred

So, suppose that for one reason or another Martin Luther is killed, either before he can be spirited to safety or because Frederick III doesn't do so. What sort of changes are we looking at for the Reformation?

Does the Reformation radicalize, mostly fail in the first generation, and come out with a bunch of quasi Anabaptists? Does someone else emerge to moderate, as Luther did? Or does Luther go down in history as an abortive first attempt that will re-emerge in a generation?
 

Polemarchos

Banned
So, suppose that for one reason or another Martin Luther is killed, either before he can be spirited to safety or because Frederick III doesn't do so. What sort of changes are we looking at for the Reformation?

Does the Reformation radicalize, mostly fail in the first generation, and come out with a bunch of quasi Anabaptists? Does someone else emerge to moderate, as Luther did? Or does Luther go down in history as an abortive first attempt that will re-emerge in a generation?

Calvinist Swine radicalize all of Northern Europe.
 
So, suppose that for one reason or another Martin Luther is killed, either before he can be spirited to safety or because Frederick III doesn't do so. What sort of changes are we looking at for the Reformation?

Does the Reformation radicalize, mostly fail in the first generation, and come out with a bunch of quasi Anabaptists? Does someone else emerge to moderate, as Luther did? Or does Luther go down in history as an abortive first attempt that will re-emerge in a generation?

Luther simply becomes another Jan Hus. Perhaps Germany erupts in response as Bohemia did after Hus' execution at Constance a century earlier. Another attempt at Reformation might well emerge, but nothing is inevitable.
 
Would this be before or after Zwingli's emergence as a fellow Reformation leader?

... You know, I intended to say "after the Diet of Worms". So, about a year before.

Luther simply becomes another Jan Hus. Perhaps Germany erupts in response as Bohemia did after Hus' execution at Constance a century earlier. Another attempt at Reformation might well emerge, but nothing is inevitable.

I'm a bit skeptical that the Reformation could be averted. Increasing nationalism, a growing literate class, and a church with little in the way of spiritual authority are pretty strong incentives to some sort of schism. I suppose something like the Cluniac reform could avert the "little in the way of spiritual authority" but post-Diet seems like a pretty late window.
 

tenthring

Banned
Luther was providing something the market wanted. If he didn't, another provider would emerge.

Fundamentally, I just can't see Northern and Southern Europe remaining under the same religious authority. Whatever your thoughts about God, religion as practiced in the world is largely a social phenomenon. Northern Europe at that time was demanding a different social organization then the church could provide.
 
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