Augsburg

The imperial city of Augsburg figures prominently in the history and historiography of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation for several reasons. First, Augsburg was an eminent center of printing, artistic production, and humanist learning which also evolved into a major communication hub in the course of the sixteenth century. Second, the city’s name is associated with several crucial events of the period, such as Martin Luther’s interview with Cardinal Cajetan during the imperial diet of 1518; the Augsburg Confession, a Protestant statement of faith penned by Luther’s collaborator Philipp Melanchthon and presented to Emperor Charles V during the imperial diet of 1530; the Augsburg Interim, an essentially Catholic formulation of religious doctrine with some concessions to Protestants that the emperor imposed on the Holy Roman Empire in 1548; and the Religious Peace of Augsburg, a settlement between the emperor (represented by his brother, King Ferdinand) and the empire’s estates during the imperial diet of 1555. Third, Augsburg exemplifies the complexity of religious reform in some German communities. While cities such as Nuremberg or Zurich became associated with one particular strand of reform—Lutheranism or Zwinglianism—early on, various groups rivaled for ascendancy from the 1520s to the 1550s. Followers of Martin Luther were sidelined by adherents Ulrich Zwingli and the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer during the 1530s, and Anabaptists attracted a sizable following until the city government cracked down on them in the late 1520s. Meanwhile, the presence of prominent families such as the Fuggers and their close ties to the emperor ensured the survival of a Catholic minority. After years of hesitation and compromise, the city council adopted Protestantism officially in 1534–1537, prohibiting the Mass and dissolving the monasteries. Yet, after the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in 1547, Emperor Charles V reintroduced Catholic worship in Augsburg and changed the city constitution, giving Catholic patricians (who were his strongest supporters) a disproportionate share of council seats and high administrative offices. The Religious Peace of Augsburg finally provided safeguards for Catholic minorities in imperial cities, thus paving the way for the institutionalized coexistence of the Lutheran and Catholic faiths in Augsburg. Fourth, historians of culture, gender, the urban poor, and marginal groups began to mine the extraordinarily rich holdings of Augsburg’s city archives in the final decades of the 20th century. They found that the city’s tax and court records contain a wealth of information on the common people, who left few records of their own. Augsburg has thus become the focus of a number of innovative studies that explore the social and cultural dimensions of the urban Reformation. It is due to these works that we know more about craftsmen, women, the poor, and the delinquent in Augsburg than in most other 16th-century German cities and towns.

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