Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse (13 November 1504 – 31 March 1567), nicknamed der Großmütige (lit. 'the Magnanimous'), was a German nobleman and a champion of the Protestant Reformation, notable for being one of the most important of the early Protestant rulers in Germany. He was also one of the main belligerents in the War of the Katzenelnbogen Succession.
Early life and embracing of Protestantism
Philip was the son of Landgrave William II of Hesse and his second wife Anna of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. His father died when Philip was five years old, and in 1514 his mother, after a series of struggles with the Estates of Hesse, succeeded in becoming regent on his behalf. The struggles over authority continued, however. To put an end to them, Philip was declared of age in 1518, his actual assumption of power beginning the following year. The power of the Estates had been broken by his mother, but he owed her little else. His education had been very imperfect, and his moral and religious training had been neglected. Despite all this, he developed rapidly as a statesman, and soon began to take steps to increase his personal authority as a ruler.
The first meeting of Philip of Hesse with Martin Luther took place in 1521, at the age of 17, at the Diet of Worms. There he was attracted by Luther's personality, though he had at first little interest in the religious elements of the gathering. Philip embraced Protestantism in 1524 after a personal meeting with the theologian Philipp Melanchthon. He then helped suppress the German Peasants' War by defeating Thomas Müntzer at the Battle of Frankenhausen.
Philip refused to be drawn into the anti-Lutheran league of George, Duke of Saxony, in 1525. By his alliance with John, Elector of Saxony, concluded in Gotha on 27 February 1526, he showed that he was already taking steps to organize a protective alliance of all Protestant princes and powers. At the same time, he united political motives with his religious policy. As early as the spring of 1526, he sought to prevent the election of the Catholic Archduke Ferdinand as Holy Roman Emperor. At the Diet of Speyer in the same year, Philip openly championed the Protestant cause, rendering it possible for Protestant preachers to propagate their views while the Diet was in session, and, like his followers, openly disregarding ordinary Roman Catholic ecclesiastical usages.
Introduction of the Reformation in Hesse
Although there was no strong popular movement for Protestantism in Hesse, Philip determined to organize the church there according to Protestant principles. In this he was aided not only by his chancellor, the humanist Johann Feige, and his chaplain, Adam Krafft, but also by the ex-Franciscan François Lambert of Avignon, a staunch enemy of the faith he had left. While the radical policy of Lambert, embodied in the Homberg church order, was abandoned, at least in part, the monasteries and religious foundations were dissolved and their property was applied to charitable and scholastic purposes. The University of Marburg was founded in the summer of 1527 to be, like the University of Wittenberg, a school for Protestant theologians.
Philip's father-in-law George, Duke of Saxony, the bishop of Würzburg, Konrad II von Thungen, and the archbishop of Mainz, Albert III of Brandenburg, were active in agitating against the growth of the Reformation. Their activities, along with other circumstances, including rumors of war, convinced Philip of the existence of a secret league among the Roman Catholic princes. His suspicions were confirmed to his own satisfaction by a forgery given him by an adventurer who had been employed in important missions by George of Saxony, one Otto von Pack. After meeting with Elector John of Saxony in Weimar on 9 March 1528, it was agreed that the Protestant princes should take the offensive in order to protect their territories from invasion and capture.
Both Luther and the elector's chancellor, Gregor Brück, though convinced of the existence of the conspiracy, counseled strongly against acting on the offensive. The imperial authorities at Speyer now forbade all breach of the peace, and, after long negotiations, Philip succeeded in extorting the expenses for his armament from the dioceses of Würzburg, Bamberg, and Mainz, the latter bishopric also being compelled to recognize the validity of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Hessian and Saxon territory until the Holy Roman Emperor or a Christian council should decide to the contrary.
Political conditions were nonetheless very unfavorable to Philip, who might easily be charged with disturbing the peace of the empire, and at the Second Diet of Speyer, in the spring of 1529, he was publicly ignored by Emperor Charles V. Nevertheless, he took an active part in uniting the Protestant representatives, as well as in preparing the celebrated Protestation at Speyer. Before leaving the city he succeeded in forming, on 22 April 1529, a secret understanding between Saxony, Hesse, Nuremberg, Strasburg, and Ulm.
Philip was especially anxious to prevent division over the subject of the Eucharist. Through him Huldrych Zwingli was invited to Germany, and Philip thus prepared the way for the celebrated Marburg Colloquy. Although the attitude of the Wittenberg theologians frustrated his attempts to bring about harmonious relations, and although the situation was further complicated by the position of Georg, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who demanded a uniform confession and a uniform church order, Philip held that the differences between the followers of Martin Bucer and the followers of Luther in their sacramental theories admitted honest disagreement, and that Holy Scripture could not resolve the differences definitively.
The result was that Philip was suspected of a tendency toward Zwinglianism. His sympathy for the Reformers associated with Zwingli in Switzerland and Bucer in Strasburg was intensified by the anger of the emperor at receiving from Philip a statement of Protestant tenets composed by the ex-Franciscan Lambert, and the landgrave's failure to secure any common action on the part of the Protestant powers regarding the approaching Turkish war. Philip eagerly embraced Zwingli's plan of a great Protestant alliance to extend from the Adriatic to Denmark to keep the Holy Roman Emperor from crossing into Germany. This association caused some coldness between himself and the followers of Luther at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, especially when he propounded his irenic policy to Melanchthon and urged that all Protestants should stand together in demanding that a general council alone should decide religious differences. This was supposed to be indicative of Zwinglianism, and Philip soon found it necessary to explain his exact position on the question of the Eucharist, whereupon he declared that he fully agreed with the Lutherans, but disapproved of persecuting the Swiss.
The arrival of the emperor put an end to these disputes for the time being. But when Charles V demanded that the Protestant representatives should take part in the procession of Corpus Christi, and that Protestant preaching should cease in the city, Philip bluntly refused to obey. He now sought in vain to secure a modification of the tenth article of the Augsburg Confession, but when the position of the Upper Germans was officially rejected, Philip left the Diet directing his representatives manfully to uphold the Protestant position, and to keep general, not particular, interests constantly in view. At this time he offered Luther a refuge in his own territories and began to cultivate close relations with Martin Bucer, whose understanding of political questions created a common bond of sympathy between them. Moreover, Bucer fully agreed with the landgrave on the importance of compromise measures in treating the controversy surrounding the Eucharist.
Leader of the Schmalkaldic League
The German prince's Evangelical interpretation of "cuius regio, eius religio" ("Whose realm, his religion" ) at the Diet of Speyer in 1526, gave the Landgrave authority to garner enough political support to start a war effort, or at least a defensive effort. This effort resulted in the foundation of: the League of Gotha, then the League of Torgau, and finally the Schmalkaldic League. The Holy Roman Empire's elector John of Saxony, Philip's most powerful ally, agreed to, "oppose the terms of the Edict of Worms, which outlawed Martin Luther and demanded his punishment as a heretic". The Schmalkaldic League assumed the role of protectors of Protestant lands, the members of which were formally recognized in the First Agreement of the Schmalkaldic League in 1531.