Radical Protestant Propaganda of the Thirty Years' War

Although Martin Luther did not compose any broadsheets himself, and only ordered one to
be published, he implicitly gave his blessing to the propaganda campaign endorsing
Protestantism because he did not publicly distance himself from it. Instead, he allowed his
image to be used by the propagandists to further his cause. They made Martin Luther the
feature of their campaign, 6 and moulded him, in the public eye, into a people’s hero, a saint,
and a father of the Church. This made him into both an advertisement for the Protestant
cause and its leading figure. 7
Hans Sachs and Philipp Melanchton are numbered among those who used the priest’s
writings for propagandistic purposes, selecting texts according to theme for specific
audiences, and adapting them to be used in relation to contemporary events. 8
The success of Luther’s ideas in the Empire even took the Wittenberg priest himself by
surprise. He had never intended the original theses to be launched into the public sphere,
and had only hoped that they would serve as a platform for debate within the Church.
Nonetheless, his works quickly struck a chord with the public, and all attempts to suppress
his texts failed. 9
Much of the propaganda came to be centred around the figure of Martin Luther himself. On
the one hand he had provided the intellectual content for much of the Protestant
propaganda, and on the other his person became the object of intense scrutiny, both in
Protestant and Catholic writing. The concentration on Luther and his arguments meant that
he and his ideas became well-known in the Empire, despite the fact that his own writing had
6 See Robert W. Scribner’s chapter ‘Images of Luther 1519-25’, in For the Sake of Simple Folk. Popular
Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 14-37. Henceforth
Scribner.
7 Heintzl, p. 217.
8 Heintzl, pp. 215-6.
9 Heintzl, p. 215.
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