THE COMPLEXION OF RELIGIOUS REFORM

The lands of Franconia, Ansbach and Kulmbach included, had not been immune to religious innovation before the arrival of the Reformation. Nor was the territory exempt from the suspect outgrowths of the religious revival common to other regions of the Empire in the sixteenth century. Anabaptism, for example, took root in Herzogenaurach, Erlangen, Uttenreuth, and Nuremberg (all located within the borders of Ansbach), where it had been planted and fertilised by the influential Anabaptist leader Hans Hut. At first, margrave Georg was reluctant to prosecute the Anabaptists with too much vigour; he feared, as he expressed it in 1528, that surplus zeal in this matter might cause some of the true followers of Christ to fall under the blade. Nevertheless, he did issue a mandate against Anabaptism that same year and continued to encourage the Ansbach council to remain vigilant and displace unwanted sects. Total success, a territory-wide uprooting of deviant persuasions, was never a possibility, nor was it ever a strict necessity. Pockets of Anabaptist congregations remained well into the closing years of the century; visitations continued to unearth parishioners who were considered (or considered themselves) to be members of this forbidden sect. But their beliefs endured as a private confidence shared among socially harmless groupings tucked away in the rural parishes. Anabaptism did not present the margravial church with a real threat.

Within its own borders, the principality was free of serious confessional antagonism: neither crypto-Calvinism, Zwinglianism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, nor any sizeable followings of the more kindred theological offshoots, such as the followers of Matthias Flacius Illyricus, found voice in the margravate. The only other consolidated religious grouping was that of the Jews.