Between Opposition and Collaboration: Nobles, Bishops, and the German Reformations in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg, 1555–1619 by Richard J. Ninness (review)

This study, which looks at the role of the imperial knights in the governance and politics of the prince-bishopric of Bamberg in the late sixteenth century, advances our understanding of how the imperial church in particular, and the Empire more generally, responded to the challenges posed by the Reformation. Ninness emphasizes that, by the early sixteenth century, the imperial knights dominated the cathedral chapter, the corporate body of high churchmen that chose the Bishops of Bamberg (who were, of course, imperial knights themselves). The knights also served the bishops in administrative positions and were the bishops’ most important creditors. Although many of the knightly families converted to Lutheranism in the middle of the sixteenth century, they continued to serve as administrators and continued to send sons to the cathedral chapter until the Thirty Years’ War. Traditional family ties and patronage networks functioned with little change for much of the century, even as confessional conflicts grew.

The Reformation spread in Bamberg as many knights used their rights of patronage to appoint Lutheran ministers to the parishes they controlled. The Peace of 1555 gave the free imperial knights the right to choose their own religion, although their right to exert the jus reformandi, the power to determine the religion in the villages under their rule, was not clear. In any case, in Bamberg the knights treated parishes under their control as their own property, as they always had. At the same time, Ninness argues, the knights as a group maintained their sense of “regional particularism” by continuing their relationship with the prince-bishopric. Ninness argues further that “at the end of the 1570s, the cathedral chapter and the imperial knights saved Bamberg from the storm of the Protestant Reformation” (70). The knights, both Catholic and Lutheran, wanted to preserve the ecclesiastical principality “for future generations of imperial knights” (71) and therefore maintained, as a corporation, confessional neutrality. The support of the knights also meant that Bamberg, like other south-German ecclesiastical principalities, did not need Habsburg or Wittelsbach bishops to survive, as Cologne did, for example.

If the knights played a major role in saving Bamberg for the Catholic Church, they also supported the resistance of traditional churchmen to Church reforms. The aristocratic church (Adelskirche) in Bamberg, as elsewhere in Germany, had little interest in Tridentine reforms. The cathedral chapter, for example, opposed the establishment of a Jesuit college in Bamberg. Ninness gives numerous examples of efforts by reform-minded bishops to appoint Catholic officials and remove Protestant ones, and of the difficulties they had doing so. Passive resistance by established officials, application of family influence through the cathedral chapter, and a shortage of qualified Catholic candidates hindered reform. Lutheran knightly families also effectively resisted efforts to appoint Catholic priests in rural parishes, hindering confessionalization on the ground.

At the same time, Protestant officials found themselves acting as “agents of the Counter-Reformation”—ordered, for example, to remove Protestant ministers from parishes. Ninness emphasizes the ambivalent attitude of these officials. Interpreting their actions, he suggests, for example, that one official was “dragging his feet, which could be interpreted as passive resistance or, worse, as his attempt to compromise Counter-Reformation measures” (122). In other cases, Lutheran officials did install Catholic priests and remove Lutheran ministers, as demanded by the bishop. In many cases, a moderate modus vivendi developed there between Lutherans and traditional Catholics. The problem was that under increasingly reform-minded bishops, particularly Bishop Neithard von Thüngen in the 1590s, cooperation across confessional boundaries became more difficult.

Here Ninness tells a well-known story. Catholic reformers, particularly the Jesuits, increased the levels of anti-Protestant rhetoric and attempted to convert rural populations. Ministers and common folk resisted these efforts, sometimes successfully and sometimes with force. Although the cathedral chapter was uninterested in aggressive...