page_title: History of religious pluralism
section_title: Protestant Reformation
hierarchical_section_title: History of religious pluralism / Europe / Protestant Reformation
caption_attribution_description: English: Confutatio Augustana and Confessio Augustana presented to Charles the V in 1530, Catholic and Lutheran sides presenting documents at the Diet of Augsburg.
context_page_description: The history of religious pluralism is the fruit of a long development that reaches from antiquity to contemporary trends in postmodernity.
context_section_description: The Reformation resulted in a weakening of the power of the papacy, which was unable to control the spread of information such as Luther's Ninety-five theses. Although Jan Huss was burned at the stake in 1415, Luther's enemies were unable to do the same to him a century later due to protection from the local ruler of Saxony. The split between the Lutherans and the Catholics was made public and clear with the 1521 Edict of Worms: the edicts of the Diet condemned Luther and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas. Acceptance of the Lutherans was first granted in the 1530 Augsburg Confession and later the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. Although other Christian churches were not accepted, some of them found legal recognition when Phillip Melancthon agreed to publish an altered version of the Augsburg Confession.
  Luther brokered the 1525 treaty between Albert, Duke of Prussia and Sigismund I the Old that facilitated the expulsion of the Teutonic knights and the secularization of the Duchy of Prussia. The new state was officially Lutheran but in practice pluralistic. Following the legal principle of cuius regio, eius religio, states within the Holy Roman Empire following the 1555 Peace of Augsburg were officially the religion of the ruler. As a result emigration was sometimes necessary to avoid enforcement. Various religious refugees, such as the Huguenots, some Anglicans, Quakers, Anabaptists or even Jesuits or Capuchins were able to find refuge at Istanbul and in the Ottoman Empire, where they were given right of residence and worship. Further, the Ottomans supported the Calvinists in Transylvania and Hungary but also in France. The contemporary French thinker Jean Bodin wrote:
  The great emperor of the Turks does with as great devotion as any prince in the world honour and observe the religion by him received from his ancestors, and yet detests he not the strange religions of others; but on the contrary permits every man to live according to his conscience: yes, and that more is, near unto his palace at Pera, suffers four diverse religions viz. that of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mahometans.
  — Jean Bodin.
  In Transylvania it was declared in 1568 at Turda the religious tolerance for every religion and it was realised the religious pluralism. The role of authority was to supervise the peaceful religious cohabitation between Catholics, Calvinist, Lutheran, antirtinitarians, orthodox, sabbatharians, Jews and Muslims. The Transylvanian situation remained for long time an isolated fearful model of "diabolic liberty" (Beze, Basel,1569)but was well known and appreciated between religious persecuted antitrinitarians in Holland and in England.
  The Thirty Years' War began when the Protestant Frederick V, Elector Palatine accepted the throne of Bohemia from the Bohemian estates. This initiated the Thirty Years' War, one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. It was both a religious war (with Protestants hoping to preserve the freedoms of the Letter of Majesty) and a political war. Ottoman Turks and French Catholics fought on the "Protestant" side against the Habsburgs. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia brought an end to the European wars of religion and allowed the Protestant rulers to continue being Protestant. Theologically, the following syncretistic controversy prodded Protestants to understand and appreciate the Roman Catholic side more.  
  Restrictions on smaller Protestant sects who disagreed with the national churches in these countries prompted such groups as the Pilgrim Fathers to seek freedom in North America, although when these became the majority they sometimes sought to deny this freedom to Jews and Roman Catholics.
caption: Confutatio Augustana (Catholic, on left) and Confessio Augustana (Lutheran, on right) being presented at the Diet of Augsburg. This picture is somewhat ahistorical because a written copy of the Confutatio was never provided by the Catholics; rather they had to go off of stenographers they had brought with them just in case the Catholics wouldn't give them a copy.
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