Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted from Religion and World Civilizations: How Faith Shaped Societies from Antiquity to the Present, 3 Vols. (edited by Andrew Holt). Copyright © 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic. All rights reserved. Reproduced here with the permission of Bloomsbury Academic (Ordering information provided below).

Christians and Muslims had often engaged in warfare prior to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation resulted in the emergence of a third major division of Christianity, to include Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. Muslims engaged in jihad against Orthodox Byzantine Christians as early as the seventh century and against Latin Christians in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean in the eighth century. During the late eleventh century, Latin Christians developed a unique type of holy war that would come to be known as a crusade, which would develop institutionally and continue in varying parts or forms into the early modern era. When the earliest leaders of the Protestant Reformation began to emerge during the early sixteenth century, it is perhaps not surprising that they rejected crusading, as it depended on papal authority and offered indulgences to participants, both of which had been rejected by the influential German monk and reformer Martin Luther (d. 1546). In the case of Luther, we can see a development of thought on the issue of Christian participation in warfare necessitated by concerns that emerged as a result of the Ottoman threat to Europe in the early sixteenth century. While Luther’s early commentary on the subject rejected the validity of Christian warfare against the Turks, he would later come to embrace it under limited circumstances that aligned with his evolving Protestant views of Christian morality and ethics.

The Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine capital city of Constantinople by the armies of Mehmed II in 1453 opened up a pathway for Turkish expansion into Europe. Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, became the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and later Ottoman sultans would focus their military efforts on securing eastern Europe as a base for expansion into central Europe in the decades and centuries that followed. Indeed, twice, in 1529 and 1683, Turkish armies attacked Vienna, Austria, with such attacks representing the deepest penetration of Ottoman forces into Europe.

While political concerns often dictated the various alliances of European forces during this period, with some Christians even allying with the Ottomans at times, many European Christian authorities nevertheless framed resistance to the Muslim Turks in the context of a holy war. Popes offered indulgences, for example, to those who would defend European cities and lands from the Turks and framed such efforts as a duty of Christians.

Luther rejected papal authority, as well as Catholic belief in indulgences, and so it is not surprising that he would, thus, reject the notion that the papacy could legitimately call for holy wars and offer spiritual benefits to those who participated in them. In Luther’s Explanation of the 95 theses, published in 1518, he commented on the potential for war with the Ottomans, effectively rejecting the notion that European Christians even had a moral right to resist the Turks. This was during a time when Luther called for the reform of what he saw as a sinful Christian population in Europe and its errant religious leaders and institutions, especially the papacy. Consequently, he interpreted Ottoman military successes as a form of divine chastisement and argued it would be futile to resist God’s punishment. Luther expanded on this topic in a 1521 work (An Argument in Defense of All the Articles of Martin Luther Wrongly Condemned in the Roman Bull) defending himself from several charges made against him in a papal bull, among which was the claim that Luther argued Christians were not to make war against the Turk. Luther responded by highlighting the failures of papal holy wars (offering indulgences) against the Turks up to that point, especially in Hungary. He then argued it is not that Christians cannot make war against the Turk, but that first they must renounce their sins and make themselves holy and pleasing to God, as otherwise they would only be fighting against an angry God and his just punishments.

It was during the 1520s that Luther developed his thinking about warfare more broadly, and not just in cases involving the Turks. In his work On Temporal Authority, for example, he argued that Christians should not resist unjust actions by the Holy Roman emperor with force, but that soldiers had the right to refuse to participate in an unjust war. In response to the Peasants’ War (1524–1525), Luther sympathized with the peasants’ grievances, but warned against the use of violence to achieve their ends. Later, in a work titled Against the Robbing, Murdering Hordes of Peasants, Luther supported efforts by the nobility to use military force to suppress the peasants’ once the revolt became violent. In his 1526 work Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved, Luther laid out conditions by which a Christian could act as a soldier in good conscience, which required efforts to establish peace before resorting to violence, that only equals could fight each other, and that only participation in defensive wars was acceptable.

Perhaps due to the evolving nature of Luther’s general views on Christian participation in warfare during the 1520s, his views on war against the Ottomans appear to have evolved as well. When he published his 1528 essay On War against the Turk, he explicitly embraced it under certain circumstances. Luther rationalized his earlier rejection of war against the Turks by arguing that the papacy had previously only used the Turkish threat as a pretext to rob Germany of money through indulgences and never seriously intended to use it for the defense of Europe. Thus, he argued, he only rejected the papal form of warfare against the Turks. Yet with the city of Vienna under threat, and at a time when Turkish expansion into Europe was a serious concern for many Europeans, Luther argued that a defensive war was indeed permissible so long as those who fought in it repented of their sins and it was led by lay rulers and not the papacy. Under these circumstances, he argued, Christian rulers had the moral duty to protect their subjects. Yet Luther, an advocate of the Protestant belief that a person was only justified, or made righteous, by faith alone (sola fide), rejected any notion that participation in such a conflict merited redemption of any sort, as suggested by the issuance of papal indulgences.

Andrew Holt

See also: Volume 1: Byzantium: Byzantine Conflicts with Islam; Fall of Constantinople (1453); Early Medieval Europe (500–1000): Founding of the Holy Roman Empire; Volume 2: Medieval Europe (1000–1450): Origins of the Crusading Movement; Medieval Arab Civilization: Origins of Jihad; Seljuk and Ottoman Civilizations: Defeat of the Ottomans at the Second Siege of Vienna (1683); Ottoman Conquest of the Byzantine Empire; Volume 3: Early Modern Europe (1450–1750):French Wars of Religion; Martin Luther and the Origins of the Reformation

Further Reading

Forell, George W. “Luther and the War against the Turks.” Church History 14, no. 4 (1945): 256–271.

Francisco, Adam. Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Luther, Martin, Christopher Boyd Brown, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, and Helmut T. Lehmann. Luther’s Works. Vol. 46. St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955.

Phillips, Matthew. “Luther on the Crusades.” Historia et Memoria, June 15, 2015. https://wp.cune.edu/matthewphillips/2015/06/15/luther-on-the-crusades/

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Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Religion-World-Civilizations-volumes-Societies/dp/1440874239

Religion and World Civilizations: How Faith Shaped Societies from Antiquity to the Present, 3 Vols. (edited by Andrew Holt). Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

“An indispensable resource for readers investigating how religion has influenced societies and cultures, this three-volume encyclopedia assesses and synthesizes the many ways in which religious faith has shaped societies from the ancient world to today.

Each volume of the set focuses on a different era of world history, ranging through the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Every volume is filled with essays that focus on religious themes from different geographical regions. For example, volume one includes essays considering religion in ancient Rome, while volume three features essays focused on religion in modern Africa. This accessible layout makes it easy for readers to learn more about the ways that religion and society have intersected over the centuries, as well as specific religious trends, events, and milestones in a particular era and place in world history.

Taken as a whole, this ambitious and wide-ranging work gathers more than 500 essays from more than 150 scholars who share their expertise and knowledge about religious faiths, tenets, people, places, and events that have influenced the development of civilization over the course of recorded human history.”