CHAPTER TWO THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND ARISTOCRATIC CONTROL OF BAMBERG Although many Franconian imperial knights were sympathetic to the Protestant Reformation, those living in and around Bamberg did not withdraw their support from the Imperial Church. In the Prince- Bishopric of Bamberg, the dominance of family over religious calling or spiritual behavior in the selection of important church offi cers refl ected the fact of noble control. By the end of the fourteenth century, an elite from the lower nobility had begun to assume power in the prince-bishopric. Th e development of imperial knighthood made local aristocratic control over Bamberg airtight. Th e canons of the cathedral chapter, the prince-bishop, and the highest secular offi cials in the bureaucracy came from imperial knightly families. Bamberg’s nobles dominated the ecclesiastical principality, excluding especially the progeny of powerful princes, so that only members from imperial knightly families received important church offi ces in the cathedral chapter or were elected to the offi ce of prince-bishop. In fact, the domi- nance of family over religious calling was so powerful in the sixteenth century that many of the prince-bishops elected from imperial knightly families were not even priests at election.1 Th reats to the Imperial Church jeopardized this way of life for the imperial knights with close connections to ecclesiastical principalities. Th e dangers posed by the Protestant Reformation were all too apparent in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg. By the 1530s, Bamberg was surrounded by Protestant neighbors who had seized about half of the parishes from the Diocese of Bamberg. Faced with religious turmoil that threatened their access to high offi ce and the very existence of the prince-bishopric they served, the imperial knights of Bamberg con- tinued to focus on their own aff airs and developed a wait-and-see atti- tude toward the events that were shaking the empire. Few high-profi le supporters of the Protestant Reformation existed among the imperial 1 Th is was a standard practice for the empire, where prelates oft en saw themselves more as princes than as spiritual leaders. Kremer, Herkunft , 313–15; Ziegler, “Hochstift e.” For Bamberg, see Weiss, Exemte Bistum Bamberg, 36. the reformation and aristocratic control 45 knights.2 In fact, despite what sympathy for Reformation ideas many of them had, the Franconian imperial knights supported the institutions of the Imperial Church in their public pronouncements. Aft er many years in which the very existence of the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg and the status of the imperial knights were constantly in question, the Peace of Augsburg brought the opposed confessional par- ties of estates together for a lasting settlement of seemingly irreconcil- able positions that proved a boon to both Bamberg and the imperial knights. Th e peace recognized the imperial knights’ right to be either Catholic or Lutheran and also sought to preserve the Catholic part of the Imperial Church through the provision known as the Ecclesiastical Reservation, seemingly solving both the imperial knights’ individual problems regarding the Protestant Reformation and those of the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg. With the right to choose between the Confession of Augsburg and the old church, many of Bamberg’s imperial knightly families promoted the Confession of Augsburg in their own lands and themselves became Protestant. Beyond issues of faith, imperial knightly support for the Protestant Reformation maximized their power by allowing them to increase their control of religious practices without interference from diocesan authority. Nevertheless, the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg remained an important part of the knights’ lives. Th e imperial knight- hood as a body also took an offi cial position of backing the Imperial Church, indicated in its support for the Ecclesiastical Reservation in 1576. In this confrontation over whether a prelate should be compelled to resign if he converted to Protestantism, which would decide whether the Catholic ecclesiastical principalities could remain as such, the imperial knights sided with the Catholic party in the diet. According to the Peace of Augsburg, the prince-bishop and the canons of Bamberg had to be Catholic. But the authorities in Bamberg did not have to stop governing according to the principles of patronage, resulting in the governance of Bamberg by Protestant offi cials and by some Catholic canons and prince-bishops from Protestant families. In 1519, the fi rst signs of public support for the Reformation in the Diocese of Bamberg appeared in Nuremberg when Lazarus Spengler and city council member Willibald Pirckheimer defended 2 One of them, Sylvester von Schaumberg, an open advocate for Martin Luther, had served in Bamberg as an offi cial in the early sixteenth century..