NEWS FROM SAOIRSE (freedom). The Voice of the Irish Republican Movement. Republican Sinn Féin http://rsf.ie 223 Parnell Street, Dublin 1 229 Falls Road, Belfast

AFTER the death of Charlemagne the Carolingian Empire was divided by his sons into four parts: Germany, France, Italy and Burgundy.

The Kingdom of Burgundy was made up of present-day Belgium and Holland plus Alsace, Franche-Comte and a few other territories. It provided a buffer between France and Germany throughout the Middle Ages, so that most of the fighting between those countries took place in Italy.

Queen Jadwiga of Poland (1382-1399) was the first European ruler to realise the importance of containing German territorial ambitions and for that purpose she created an alliance of Poland, Hungary, France and some Italian statelets, usually with the inclusion of the Papacy, though depending on who was pope. This policy of 'encirclement' was eventually to produce a paranoid reaction in Germany itself.
 

 To resolve this and other problems a General Council of the Church met in the Swiss city of Constance in 1414. All three 'popes' were persuaded to resign and a new pope elected, laying that problem to rest. A second issue that was raised was that of how to deal with non-believers. The representative of the Teutonic Order, Johannes von Falkenburg, proposed that persons outside the faith should be given the alternative of conversion or death. He was opposed by the rector of the new University of Krakow in Poland, Paulus a'Vladimiri, who said that unbelievers should not be persecuted but rather converted by persuasion and good example. The Council supported a'Vladimiri's viewpoint. Falkenberg also called for a kind of 'fatwah' against Jagiello, king of Poland and Lithuania, because he had recently defeated the Teutonic Order, and urged that he be assassinated. The Council condemned Falkenberg's views and ordered that certain of his writings be burned.
Renaissance and Reformation

The destruction of the Byzantine Empire by the Turks caused large numbers of Byzantine scholars to flee to Italy and these brought with them the knowledge and the writings of classical Greece. The re-discovery of ancient learning triggered the Italian Renaissance, a flowering of literature, art and scholarship and a more humane and tolerant outlook on life.

In 1511 a delegation of German churchmen visited Rome on church business. One member was a young monk called Martin Luther. Luther was horrified by the Italy of the Medicis and Borgias, at the pagan opulance and debauchery and the many abuses of church power.

Back in Germany Luther began writing pamphlets highly critical of the way the Catholic Church was being run, and soon started attacking church doctrines as well. In 1520 he was sent a letter of excommunication, which he publicly burned. Under the protection of the Elector of Saxony he broke completely with Rome and established a separate church.
 

Luther decided that God has decided in advance who is saved and who is damned. Man is saved by Faith, but this is God's gift, he can do nothing to save himself.
All men are corrupt, and apart from the Chosen Few, damned. Rulers are corrupt too, but they are appointed by God and must be obeyed. This rule applies only to hereditary rulers: excluded are the Pope, the Emperor and the king of Poland; who are chosen by men.

 He also wrote attacks on the Jews, and he had Jews expelled from the parts of Germany under Lutheran control.
 

 The new state inherited from the Order the tradition of territorial expansionism, militarism, ruthlessness and the strange nihilistic fanaticism that had typified the Order throught its existence.

 In later centuries Frederick the Great, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler all had their portraits painted dressed as Teutonic knights.
 

 A compromise with Lutheran teachings was quickly rejected and many positions firmly at variance with them taken. Salvation was by Faith and Good Works, not Faith alone. Man has Free Will, he can choose to be saved or not. The authority of rulers is conditional, not absolute. There is no predestination: the world is not determinate it is indeterminate.

 But ideas of Lutheran origin deeply infected the Catholic Church. The Italian Renaissance ended as patronage of the arts petered out under the impact of a more puritanical and gloomy view of the world.

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Web layout by SAOIRSE -- Irish Freedom November 9, 2002  Send links, events notifications, articles, comments etc, to the editor at: saoirse@iol.ie.