Around the year 1500, almost every Christian in western and central Europe belonged to one church, led by the bishop of Rome, the pope. That church baptized people at birth, married them and buried them, ran many of their schools and hospitals, owned a large share of the land, and kept its own courts and laws. When people in the sixteenth century argued about religion, they were also arguing about who should hold power over souls, money, learning and law.
How salvation was understood
Late medieval Christians were taught that grace came to them chiefly through the seven sacraments, from baptism to the last rites, administered by priests. Sin was forgiven through confession and absolution, but a debt of punishment could remain, to be worked off by penance on earth or by suffering in purgatory after death. Out of this grew the indulgence. An indulgence was a grant from the church that reduced the punishment still owed for sins already confessed and forgiven. Theologians explained that the church could draw on a treasury of merit built up by Christ and the saints. Indulgences could be earned by pilgrimage, prayer or almsgiving, and increasingly by a cash payment, which made them a source of revenue and of suspicion.
A papacy in trouble
The papacy's prestige had suffered badly in the fourteenth century. From 1309 to 1377 the popes lived at Avignon, in what is now southern France, where critics saw them as tools of the French crown; the poet Petrarch compared the arrangement to the Babylonian captivity of the ancient Jews. Soon after the return to Rome came something worse. In 1378 rival groups of cardinals elected rival popes, beginning the Great Western Schism. An attempt to fix it at Pisa in 1409 only added another claimant, so that at one point three men claimed to be the true pope, each with his own cardinals and his own supporters among the kingdoms of Europe.
Councils and conciliarism
The Council of Constance (1414 to 1418) ended the schism, securing the removal of the rival claimants and electing Martin V in 1417. In the process it gave strength to conciliarism, the view that a general council of the church holds authority above the pope. Later popes fought this idea and largely defeated it by the middle of the fifteenth century, but it did not vanish, and calls for a free council would echo through the early Reformation.
Dissent before Luther
Some critics went further than reform of administration. John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian who died in 1384, inspired followers who produced the first complete English translation of the Bible. Those followers, called Lollards, were persecuted in England. In Bohemia the preacher Jan Hus took up some of Wycliffe's ideas and attacked the sale of indulgences, and his supporters demanded that ordinary believers receive the wine as well as the bread at communion. Summoned to Constance, Hus was burned as a heretic in 1415 despite a promise of safe conduct from the emperor Sigismund. His followers, the Hussites, fought off several crusades and kept a distinct church in Bohemia, showing that dissent could survive if it had armed and political backing.
Complaints about the clergy
Most critics wanted reform within the church, not a break with it. Common complaints included simony, the buying and selling of church offices; absenteeism, bishops and priests who never lived among their people; and pluralism, the practice of holding several church offices at once and collecting their incomes. Humanist scholars such as Erasmus mocked superstition and called for a simpler piety built on the Gospels.
A vigorous, not a dying, faith
It is easy to read this period backward, as a church waiting to collapse. Many historians now resist that. Parish records show people giving generously to their churches, joining religious guilds called confraternities, buying devotional books and going on pilgrimage. A movement known as the Modern Devotion encouraged lay people in the Low Countries to pursue an inward, disciplined spiritual life. Catholic historians stress this vitality; Protestant historians stress the anxieties it carried, especially fear of purgatory. Both points can be true at once: demand for religion was high, and that is exactly why disappointment with its keepers could be so sharp.
Worked example: a parish in 1500
Imagine a market town in Saxony. Its parish church holds several side altars, each endowed by a family or guild that pays a priest to say masses for its dead. A confraternity of weavers keeps candles burning before a statue of Saint Anne. The parish priest has little Latin, while a learned canon in the cathedral town collects income from three parishes he rarely visits. Every few years a preacher arrives to offer an indulgence, with the proceeds promised to a crusade or a cathedral.
Each feature could be seen two ways. The endowed masses show love for the dead and a community that prays together across generations; they also show salvation entangled with money. The absent canon is a scandal to the weavers, yet the canon would say the system funds the scholars the church needs. The indulgence preacher offers comfort to anxious families; he also takes coins from the poor. Asking how each group in the town experienced these institutions, rather than judging from one side, is the best preparation for understanding why reform movements found eager listeners and fierce opponents in the same streets.