The concept of estates or orders – functionally distinct, legally defined social groups – shaped the feudal age's social consciousness as fundamentally as the idea of class does that of the capitalist age. Adalbero (d. 1030), an eleventh-century bishop of Laon in the kingdom of West Francia, expressed in a classic form the three orders that comprise what he called “the House of God”: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Over the next 500 years, Adalbero's “orders” became “estates,” a less normative and more descriptive term rooted in the law. The change reflected such long-range trends as the advance of a money economy, greater social mobility, the decay of kinship, and of Christian notions of equality. Some regretted the results. In 1494 the Strasbourg lawyer-poet Sebastian Brant (1457–1521) condemned the decay of social distinctions as contrary to God's providence: “In every land the disgrace is great/ No longer is there anyone/satisfied with his estate.

The Council of Basel had one great achievement, the peace made in 1439 with the Bohemian Hussites. Thereafter the council skidded toward its unhappy demise a decade later. Well before then, Pope Eugenius IV's “ill-judged, hasty, and abortive” attempt to dissolve the council created a state of affairs “that was to render impossible the achievement at the council of truly significant and permanent church-wide reform.” Ideas there were aplenty, for the councils had promoted an intensive and fruitful exchange of reform principles, arguments, and agendas among the churchmen of Christendom. The central problem was agency. The pope's actions and the general council's failure presented reform-minded churchmen with a vexing question: How could a reform of “head and members” be achieved without either a pope or a general council at its head? How, especially, could it happen in the Empire, this vast kingdom with its weak monarch and its bishops deeply ensnared in its feudal governance? This was the German variation on a greater question: How could the Church be one and the churches many? On the reef of this conundrum most movements for reform foundered.

In the beginning was Waterloo. Near that small place south of Brussels on 18 July 1815, the armies of two Protestant kingdoms, Britain and Prussia, joined to crush the polyglot forces of a French power thought in Protestant lands to represent both Revolution and Rome. Within a generation Protestants were celebrating their sixteenth-century reformation as the dawn of a modern age of unprecedented prosperity, freedom, and knowledge. In 1827, with Napoleon only six years dead, the Scottish polymath Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) named the Germans the creators of three keys to modern civilization: the printing press, gunpowder, and Protestantism. (He was right about two of the three.) In 1845–47 his exact contemporary, the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), published his German History in the Age of the Reformation (1845–47), the single most influential modern interpretation of the German Protestant reformation. Ranke's vision, contrary to much received opinion, was not national but European. “It is one of the greatest coincidences presented by the history of the world,” he wrote,

The Protestant reformation grew under the sign of the Last Day. “In these last days of this transitory world,” declares the preface to the Book of Concord (1580), “the Almighty God, out of immeasurable love, grace, and mercy for the human race, has allowed the light of his holy gospel and his Word that alone grants salvation to appear and shine forth purely, unalloyed and unadulterated out of the superstitious, papistical darkness for the German nation, our beloved fatherland.” These words define Luther's principal legacy to his heirs: our lives are lived in the struggle between God and the Devil for mastery of man and the world.

One day in 1524 an Augsburg ropemaker named Ott was overheard to curse “the dishonorable priests and the rich …, who pile up goods and money and keep the truth from us. We have always been evangelicals, and we still are today, but, truly, we have been fed many lies. If we truly followed the gospel, we would all have to be like brothers.” At the center of the unprecedented storm of words and deeds that broke over the German cities during the first half of the 1520s stood precisely Ott's principle: Christians follow the Gospel as brothers. In this evangelical movement, collective hopes of a better, more just future mingled with personal hopes of salvation. For this reason, and because for a while the cities became the nurseries and schoolhouses of religious change, it is hardly going too far to say that the Protestant reformation was, at least in its youth, “an urban event.” The cities served the whole society as concentrated points of knowledge, technology, literacy, wealth, communication, and power. In their milieus new ideas could gain a hearing and new practices support. Secure within their walls could take place the mobilization of movements for change.

The reform of the Church and religious life presented the greatest leftover problem associated with Western Christendom's recovery from the fourteenth-century crisis and depression. It is neither coincidental nor merely interesting that the most luxuriously creative set of solutions should have appeared in the Holy Roman Empire. Of all the major kingdoms of Western Christendom, the Empire had experienced in the previous 100 years the least successful attempts at reform of the Church and religious life. Of all the sixteenth-century reformations, it proved easily the most tumultuous, most varied, most creative, and, therefore, least decisive. For these reasons, the Protestant reformation forms the obvious, even unavoidable, centerpiece of any account of the German lands in this epoch. Some have called it the dawn of Europe's modernity, others a failed German national revolution. About its causes, too, there is no consensus. Did it happen because of Luther's unique personality, the corruption of the Church, the formation of nation-states, or the rise of the middle classes? Each explanation founders on the reefs of the known facts or on the shoals of ignorance. We do not even know whether the Protestant reformers attacked a Church fallen from the higher standards of medieval (not to mention ancient) times; whether a more devout laity was placing higher expectations on its clergy who could not fulfill them; or whether (some) Christian people revolted against the old Church because it burdened their consciences, their pocketbooks, or both.

Between 1524 and 1526 the southern and central German lands experienced the greatest rural insurrection in European history. Whether conceived as “the greatest natural event of the German state” or as “the first attempt of the popular masses to create a unified national state from below,” the Peasants' War was a moment of decision. The shocked reactions to it provoked a debate among the German rulers about Luther's movement – was it the cause of or the remedy for the upheaval? – and thereby initiated the transformation of the popular evangelical movements into the Protestant reformation. The insurrection itself has been called “a revolution of the common man.”

The ability of farmers, joined sometimes by burghers and miners, to carry out a large-scale insurrection depended fundamentally on their experience of communal government. Enabled by this heritage, in the first decades of the sixteenth century there arose a movement for village rights, against serfdom, and in favor of stronger governance with popular participation on a territorial level. The rebels justified their demands by an appeal to a “godly law” taught by the Bible, which, though it gained vigor from the religious ferment in the cities and towns, was actually older than Luther's movement.

A prophesied age of peace and unity arrived in 1519 with the election of Spain's young king to the Imperial throne. The Archangel Michael himself, the author of “The Book of the Hundred Chapters, ” had announced, “proposes … to reestablish a firm Christian faith on earth, so that the words of our Savior may be fulfilled: ‘There shall be one flock, one shepherd.’” [John 10:16] When news of Charles's election at Frankfurt came to the royal court in Spain, Grand-Chancellor Mercurino Arborio di Gattinara (1465–1530) announced that the work begun by Charles the Great (Charlemagne) would be completed by Charles the Greatest, who would give the world one pastor and one flock.

Every sun shone on fortune's darling. Brightest of all glowed the great golden disk of Moctezuma II (ca. 1466–1520), sent to the king by Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) from the sack of Tenochtitlán. Albrecht Dürer viewed this wonder at Antwerp in 1520: “I also saw the things sent to the king from the new, golden land, a sun entirely of gold a klafter wide, a silver moon just as wide.” “In all my life,” he marveled, “I have seen nothing that so gladdened my heart as these things, for I saw there wondrous works of art and marveled at the subtle skills of those men in foreign lands.

In 1983, the year of Martin Luther's 500th birthday, Heiko Augustinus Oberman chose a coign of vantage from which to set the reformer into the age of reformations without veiling his significance for the modern era. He found such a site not beyond but above both Luther's time and all others. “Surprisingly,” Oberman wrote, “the discoveries and experiences of a life marked by battle raging within and without make him a contemporary of our time, which has learned to sublimate the Devil and marginalize God.” If we are to understand such a Luther, he added, “we must read the history of life from an unconventional perspective. It is history ‘sub specie aeternitatis,’ in the light of eternity; not in the mild glow of constant progress toward Heaven, but in the shadow of the chaos of the Last Days and the imminence of eternity.” Yet Oberman also understood that however tellingly Luther the theologian might speak to the great issues of our day, they cannot be understood, much less explained, except in terms of the ideas, issues, struggles, and solidarities of the age of reformations. Luther had his time and place, we have ours.

Part II begins the narrative that fills most of this book. Its central theme is the problem of the reform of the Empire and the Church during the decades between 1400 and 1520. The chapters play out two great stories. The first story consists of the actual reforms in governance, successful in the Empire but not in the Church. The reforms emerged not under the inspiration of ideas, such as the Church being a model for the Empire, but as a series of concrete changes inspired by political and military needs. The possibility of change depended on the king-emperor and his leading vassals coming willy-nilly to terms as co-regents of the Empire. One great change made political reforms: the institutionalization of dynastic power over specific, feudal but heritable lands, or, in a word, territorialization. Unlike their Luxemburg predecessors, the two Habsburg king-emperors of this era managed to consolidate their rule over a cluster of dynastic territories. The Austrian lands served them as a base for advancing dynastic interests in the Empire as a whole.

The Protestant reformers set out to reform churches; their disciples created confessions. Luther's revolutionary theology aimed to restore and did redraw relationships between the temporal and the spiritual realms in such a way that neither individual salvation nor the world's governance would be frustrated from achieving its respective object – the soul's reunion with God and the keeping of the world's peace. The key, so they believed, was the Church's submission to the Word in the form of true doctrine. Get this right, and – Satan's designs notwithstanding – the rest would fall into place. Whether because his tumultuous life left him no peace, or because he was a political innocent, Luther failed to work out in detail how the task should be accomplished. Each of his dicta for reordering a liberated Church's relationship to temporal authority preserved the stopgap character with which the reordering had begun.

Reflection on this outcome unveils a paradox: Martin Luther was the godfather of European Protestantism but not its creator.

Fifteenth-century Germans who traveled southward to Italy or westward to the Low Countries saw wondrous things and suffered deeply hurtful jibes at their backwardness. A Pole or Hungarian journeying in the German lands might feel the same, but Italians who traveled in them gave far more injury than they endured at native hands. Giovanni Antonio Campano (1429–77), a humanist-poet and bishop who worked in the Roman Curia, came as a cardinal's secretary to the Imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1471. It was his first venture outside his native Italy, and what he saw, and smelled, and what he had to eat and drink appalled him. “Nothing is filthier than Germany,” where “there is no life except drinking,” and each glass of the sour wine “makes me cry.” The muses have no homes here, he adds, for there “reigns a monstrous spiritual barbarism, [as] none but a few know literature, and no one elegance.” In Italy Italians treated Germans as country bumpkins, barbarians who knew nothing about how to live.

When Maximilian and his father met Duke Charles of Burgundy at Trier in 1473, Latin elegance as usual trumped German solidity.

The clergy, Bishop Adalbero's “those who pray,” belonged to the Church in a special way. These men and women embodied and tended the channels of grace between the two realms of St. Augustine's concept, the earthly city and the City of God. The clergy normally took pride of place in medieval schemes of social hierarchy and commonly formed the first estate in parliamentary bodies. One tradition of medieval teaching conceived the clergy in the broadest sense as a complete clerical society parallel to but distinct from the laity ordered into temporal or secular estates. This status was warranted, it was argued, by the clergy's guardianship of the sacramental, penitential, and intercessional ties both between God and His creatures and among His creatures.

The Church was the most regularly structured and best understood institution in late medieval Christendom. Its foundation comprised the medieval Church's greatest creation, which was not the papal monarchy or the universities but the network of territorial parishes that blanketed Christendom with a church in every place and a priest in every church. From this base the ecclesiastical system arose in tiers through territorial dioceses and their subunits (deaneries and archdeaneries), through provinces, and the papal government in Rome.