The Silken Cord: The Turks, the Apocalypse, and the Splintering of Latin Christendom

This study assesses the role of the Ottoman invasions of Eastern Europe in the early sixteenth century on the adoption of apocalyptic expectations by the leading religious Reformers of the same period, including Martin Luther, Thomaas Müntzer, Melchior Hoffman, and Heinrich Bullinger. The study analyzes the content of the apocalyptic commentaries written by these and other Reformers to demonstrate that in nearly all cases the commentators identified the Roman Church with the sinister actors in the Book of Revelation and the other books of the Christian and Jewish scriptures. In the cases of Müntzer and some of the early Anabaptists, the secular lords were also identified with the enemies of God who appear in the prophetic books. The practice of identifying confessional or social adversaries with the villains of the Last Days established a paradigm for some of the Reformers under whose terms compromise or accommodation with those adversaries was no longer thinkable, much less feasible. This paradigm inflected events such as the Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster, helping to transform them into wars against the entire established social order. This transformation in turn led to the violent repression of the Anabaptists, who were associated, however unfairly, with these two events for many years after they had ended. In a similar manner, the Reformers' identification of the papacy with the Beast and the False Teachers of Revelation created an insuperable barrier to the reconciliation of the Church at Trent or in any other setting. Indeed, long after the ebbing off the Ottoman threat to Christian Europe, the identification of the Roman Church with the agents of Satan survived.