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Bernardino Ochino and the German Reformation: the Augsburg Sermons and Flugschriften of an Italian Heretic (1543–1560)

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Bernardino Ochino and the German Reformation: the Augsburg Sermons and Flugschriften of an Italian Heretic (1543–1560) Chapter 5 Bernardino Ochino and the German Reformation: The Augsburg Sermons and Flugschriften of an Italian Heretic (1543–1560) Michele Camaioni 1 Introduction: the Emperor and the Preacher The pacific surrender of Augsburg in January 1547 marked a crucial event in the war waged by the Emperor Charles V against the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant polities that had been assembled by John Frederick I, Prince-Elector of Saxony, and Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse in order to preserve German liberties against the hegemonic agenda of the Habsburgs. Having neu- tralized the threat of a broad rebellion in Upper Germany through separate peace agreements with Augsburg and the other Imperial Cities of the region, the Emperor, and his brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, were victori- ous against the forces of Electoral Saxony in the well-known battle fought at Mühlberg in April 1547, thus also bending Northern Germany to their will.1 What in the accounts of the siege and of the bloodless capitulation of Augsburg is often overlooked, or even not mentioned by scholars, is that one of the peace conditions imposed on the city council by Charles V was the ex- tradition of two men to the Imperial authorities. The first was Sebastian von Schertlin, the commander of the Schmalkaldic troops in southern Germany, who had supported the line of hard resistance to the Emperor against the more tactful and shrewd attitude of Augsburg’s ruling oligarchy. The second man was named Bernardino Ochino. He was from the Republic of Siena, where a rebellion against the Empire was about to start. He was not a military leader, a political figure, nor someone with an important position. Instead, he was a simple preacher, although not an unknown one. To Catholics, in fact, he was someone once considered holy, who had shockingly become a treacherous and dangerous heresiarch. One of the first Capuchins, Ochino had gained great 1 See Close C.W., The Negotiated Reformation. Imperial Cities and the Politics of Urban Reform, 1525–1550 (Cambridge: 2009) 18–19, 209–247 and for further bibliography also Waley J., Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. 1: From Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia 1493–1648 (Oxford: 2012) 319–320. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004371125_007 BERNARDINO OCHINO AND THE GERMAN REFORMATION 127 reputation from the Italian pulpits until 1542, when, at the time of the estab- lishment of the Roman Inquisition and of the Council of Trent, he came under suspicion of heresy and was forced to escape the peninsula religionis causa. Firstly in Calvin’s Geneva and then in Augsburg, where he arrived in October 1545, he continued to preach, supporting the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone and addressing sharp criticism against the Roman Church and the Pope, labeled in his sermons and writings as the living Antichrist.2 When the Emperor asked the city council to leave Ochino in his hands, the councilors of Augsburg, who supported the preacher, secretly permitted him to flee from the city.3 Before this, the influential Catholic businessman Anton Fugger, and the leader of Augsburg political Protestantism, Jacob Herbrot, had tried in vain to intercede for him with Charles V.4 A small episode within the larger picture of the so-called Schmalkaldic war, the request of an Italian preacher made by the Emperor, arouses the curiosity of the early modern scholar who aims at investigating the relationship that migrants coming from the Italian peninsula established with the German cultural, political and reli- gious environment. Why did Charles V pay so much attention to the fate of a former Italian Capuchin, now sixty years old, who could not speak a word in German and in Augsburg was just able to preach in his own tongue to a small audience of tradesmen and bourgeois who understood Italian? And why did two of the most powerful men in the whole German lands protect him? In order to answer such questions, it is worth retracing briefly Ochino’s activities within the urban context of Augsburg during his one-and-a-half-year stay in this Swabian city, a period that, as said, corresponded to the closing phase of the Schmalkaldic war. 2 On this period of Ochino’s life, see Benrath K., Bernardino Ochino, of Siena. A contribution towards the history of the Reformation, translated by H. Zimmern (London: 1876) (see also the revised German edition, Braunschweig: 18922) 148–182; Bainton R.H., Bernardino Ochino esule e riformatore senese del Cinquecento 1487–1563 (Florence: 1940) 63–87; Camaioni M., Il Vangelo e l’Anticristo. Bernardino Ochino tra francescanesimo ed eresia (1487–1547) (Bologna: 2018). 3 See Francisco de Enzinas, Epistolario, ed. I.J. García Pinilla (Geneva: 1995) 176–177 (Enzinas to H. Bullinger, St. Gallen, 31 January 1547). 4 See Hecker P., “Der Augsburger Bürgermeister Jacob Herbrot und der Sturz des zünftisch- en Regiments in Augsburg”, Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins für Schwaben und Neuburg 1 (1874) 34–98, here 50, 53; “Die Korrespondenz der Stadt Augsburg mit Karl V im Ausgang des schmalkaldischen Krieges”, ibidem 257–309; Bainton, Bernardino Ochino 77, 85–86. On Anton Fugger, see Pölnitz G. v., Anton Fugger, 5 vols. (Tübingen: 1958–1986), vol. 2, 120, 377, 386 for the Ochino’s affaire; Idem, Anton Fugger (1493–1560). Vorträge und Dokumentation zum fünfhundertjährigen Jubiläum, ed. J. Burkhardt (Weißenhorn: 1994)..
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