Gravamina of the German nation

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The Gravamina of the German Nation (Latin Gravamina nationis germanicae ), often with the addition against the papal court , were late medieval and early modern complaints from the German-speaking area against the Pope and the Curia in Rome. They were of considerable importance for creating an anti-papal mood that Martin Luther and the Reformers could build on. The Gravamina movement had a considerable influence on the emergence of a German self-image as a forerunner of national consciousness .

prehistory

Part of the prehistory is that in 1448 the Vienna Concordat between Pope Nicholas V and the later Emperor Friedrich III. for the natio germanica had been completed. This agreement formed one of the foundations for the Church in the Empire until the end of the Holy Roman Empire . The concordat had only come about between the emperor and the pope against the will of the imperial estates. It regulated the papal rights, for example, with the granting of benefices , with the filling of church positions or the payment of funds to the curia. Not all the results of the reform councils in Constance and Basel were taken into account in the Concordat .

As a result, there were numerous complaints against the Pope and the Curia at the Reichstag . The authors were high clergymen, princes and free cities. Initially, the focus was on the high clergy, who also wanted to prevent regional church tendencies in the large secular territories.

Pre-Reformation period

A forerunner was the Mainz dragonfly from April 8, 1499 from an unknown clergyman and suggestions from the Elector of Trier Jakob I von Sierck and the two Augsburg dragonflies from April 10, 1450 and the two Innsbruck dragonflies from May 24, 1518. From the Mainzer libel arose after a provincial synod of the ecclesiastical province of Mainz , the first actual compilation 1455th Thirteen articles were passed to be submitted to the Pope. The Frankfurt Avisamenta of 1456 had a greater reach. In this writing, the term Gravamina nationis germanicae appears first. With the exception of Trier, the archbishops of Salzburg and Bremen and various cathedral chapters participated in this. At the Diet of 1458, electors and bishops sent similar complaints to Pope Pius II . This was followed in 1479 by the 26 Koblenz Articles and 1456 31 articles of a Mainz Provincial Synod.

Under Maximilian I , the Gravamina were discussed in 1497 and 1500 with an anticurial tenor at the Reichstag. After the break of the League of Cambrai caused by the Pope , Maximilian and his Chancellor used the Gravamina for anti-papal political goals. In 1510 he commissioned Jakob Wimpheling with a church reformatory report. The emperor wanted to put political pressure on the Pope. In the main, Wimpheling referred to the material damage to the German lands by the Pope. He resorted to Gravamina, which had already been expressed to Enea Silvio Piccolomini in 1457 . The imperial estates used the Gravamina during the Diet of Augsburg in 1518 to justify their rejection of a Turkish tax advertised by the Pope . A list of grievances, which in Liege had arisen, was in the 1519 election capitulation of Charles V was added.

Reformation time

Martin Luther had known about the Gravamina at least since the Augsburg Diet of 1518. In 1520, in his work To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation , he drew on it many times. He was not only satisfied with reproducing them, but also made concrete reform proposals. This gave the discussion a new quality.

At the Worms Reichstag of 1521, the Gravamina and Lutheran Reformation movements merged. A committee of the imperial estates, chaired by Georg von Sachsen , in which the representatives of the clergy took part only briefly, collected 102 Gravamina. This was the largest collection of its kind. If the Gravamina movement was previously supported primarily by the high clergy, it has now become exclusively a matter of the secular classes. There were also changes in terms of content. In addition to the criticism of the Pope and Curia, there was also criticism of the clergy and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the empire itself. However, Luther's aristocratic writing as a model or source probably had no direct influence.

At the Reichstag in Nuremberg in 1523, the Gravamina were recompiled into 74 articles and officially sent to the Pope by the Reich Regiment. A year later, the complaints were supplemented by the demand for a national council .

The Mainz Provincial Synod of 1524 tried to refute the individual articles. As in 1523 against Austria, the clergy began to write counter gravamina in which attacks by the secular state against the church were criticized.

The last time in 1526 was an agreement on anti-papal Gravamina at the Diet of Speyer. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, denominationalization was evidently so advanced that the Protestant estates no longer took part in the debate about the Gravamina. In contrast, the Estates who remained Catholic continued to debate the matter. The conflicts between secular and spiritual classes were largely resolved. 71 articles were put together in an imperial constitution. Charles V promised to submit this to the Pope. The constitution, however, never came into force. But it has helped to reduce the conflicts within the Catholic camp. As a result, the Gravamina cause also lost its importance within the Catholic camp, even if it was addressed again at Reichstag and on other occasions.

With the reform process following the Council of Trent , the complaints were largely out of date for the Catholic camp as well.

Content

In terms of content, the Gravamina comprised both ecclesiastical and secular questions. At the center, however, were the complaints about church grievances and especially about the papacy. The criticism of the papacy was part of the late medieval church criticism and was directed against the influence of the pope and curia on the occupation of church offices and benefices in the empire, against monetary payments for church acts in the form of indulgences , fees for ordinations and the like. The aim was to prevent the Germans from financing the splendor of the Renaissance popes. The arbitrariness of church litigation was also criticized. Taken together, the Gravamina meant the demand for a fundamental reform of the church and its return to religious sources.

meaning

The Gravamina were part of the development of the late medieval and early modern German self-confidence. Jakob Wimpfeling and Ulrich von Hutten in particular contributed to this in the first decades of the 16th century. Hutten, for example, identified the Pope as an opponent of " German freedom " instead of the Turks or France in 1518/19 . Pope and church were located in " Welschland ". Ethnically, as in Luther's nobility writing, a contrast to " Teutschland " was constructed.

A central importance of the Gravamina for the history of the Reformation was that they had created a climate hostile to Rome even before Luther's appearance. Joseph Lortz pointed out: “ Without the Gravamina of the German nation, the nation would not have responded to that first call from Luther, had Luther not become a reformer, the Reformation would not have come. "

The Gravamina were never completely forgotten in the empire and were used again since 1673 and in the 18th century to criticize the Roman Church and associated with Febronianism .

swell

  • Annelies Grundmann (arr.), Rosemarie Aulinger: The complaints of the German nation on the imperial days of the Reformation (1521-1530). German Reichstag files / Younger series, Vol. XXI. Berlin u. a. 2015.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedrich Steger (Ed.): Supplementary Conversationslexikon. 2. Vol., Erg.-Bl., Rombergs Verlag, Leipzig 1847, p. 756
  2. ↑ Heinz Angermeier : The old empire in German history . Göttingen 1991, p. 325.
  3. ↑ cit. after Johannes Wallmann : Church history in Germany since the Reformation . Tübingen 2006, p. 3.
  4. ^ Anton Schindling : "Imperial Church and German Nation in the Early Modern Era". In: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (ed.). Nation and Religion in German History . Frankfurt 2001, p. 71f.