It was in accordance with Luther’s express injunctions that the “proper authorities” proceeded to destroy such images as were not a record of history. They went further, however, nor was the zeal confined solely to the authorities.
In Prussia, the land of the Teutonic Order, the crosses and the images of the Saints had been doomed to destruction by the revolution of 1525; the silver treasures of art in the churches were hammered into plate for use at the new Lutheran Duke’s dining-table. The Estates of his country, when he had asked them to vote supplies, retorted that he might as well help himself to the treasures of the churches. The result was, so the chronicler of that day relates, “that all the chalices and other ornaments” were removed from the houses of God, barely one chalice being left in each church; some of the country churches were even driven to use pewter chalices. “When they had taken all the silver they fell upon the bells”; they left but one in each village, the rest being carried off to Königsberg and sold to the smelters.[767] At Marienwerder only did the prebendaries, appealing to the King of Poland, make a stand for the retention of their church plate and other property, until they themselves were sent in chains to Preuschmark.[768]
In 1524, during the fair, the images were dragged out of the churches at Riesenburg in Pomerania, shamelessly dishonoured and finally burnt. The bishop-elect, a dignitary whom the Pope had refused to confirm and who was notoriously a “zealous instrument of the Evangel,” excused the proceeding. In other towns similar outrages were perpetrated by the iconoclasts.
On the introduction of Lutheranism at Stralsund almost all the churches and monasteries were stormed, the crucifixes and images being broken up in the presence of members of the town-council (1525).[769]
In 1525 the Lutherans at Dantzig took possession of the wealthy church of St. Mary’s, which was renowned for the number of its foundations and had 128 clergy attached to it. A list of the articles confiscated or plundered comprises: ten chalices of gold with precious stones of great value, and as many bejewelled gold patens and ampullae; a ciborium of gold with corals and gems, two gold crosses with gems, an image of the Virgin Mary with four angels in gold, a silver statue of the same, silver statues of the Apostles, four and twenty silver ciboriums, six and forty silver chalices, two dozen of them of silver-gilt, twelve silver and silver-gilt ampullae, eleven ungilt silver ampullae, twenty-three silver vessels, twelve of them being gilt, twelve silver-gilt chalices with lids, twelve silver-gilt crosses with corals and precious stones, two dozen small silver crosses, eight large and ten small silver censers, etc., twelve chasubles in cloth of gold with pearls and gems, twelve of red silk with a gold fringe, besides this eighty-two silk chasubles, twelve cloth-of-gold antependiums with pearls and gems, six costly copes, twelve other silk copes, six and forty albs of gold and silver embroidered flower-pattern, sixty-five other fine albs, eighty-eight costly altar covers, forty-nine gold-embroidered altar cloths, ninety-nine less elaborate altar cloths.[770]
When Bugenhagen had secured the triumph of Lutheranism in the town of Brunswick the altars were thrown down, the pictures and statues removed, the chalices and other church vessels melted down and the costly mass vestments sold to the highest bidder at the Rathaus (1528). Bugenhagen, Luther’s closest spiritual colleague, laboured zealously to sweep the churches clean of “every vestige of Popish superstition and idolatry.” Only the collegiate churches of St. Blasius and St. Cyriacus, and the monastery of St. Egidius, of which Duke Henry of Brunswick was patron, remained intact.[771]
The wildest outbreak of iconoclasm took place in 1542 in the Duchy of Brunswick, when the Elector Johann Frederick of Saxony and Landgrave Philip of Hesse occupied the country and proceeded to extirpate the Catholic worship still prevalent there. Within a short while over four hundred churches had been plundered, altars, tabernacles, pictures and sculptures being destroyed in countless numbers.[772]
During this so-called “Evangelical War” five thousand burghers and mercenaries of the town of Brunswick, shouting their war-cry: “The Word of God remaineth for ever,” set out, on July 21, 1542, against the monastery of Riddaghausen; there they broke down the altars, images and organs, carried off the monstrances, mass vestments and other treasures of the church, plundering generally and perpetrating the worst abominations. The mob also broke in pieces the images and pictures in the monastery of Steterburg and then demolished the building. Nor did the abbey of Gandersheim fare much better. The prebendaries there complained to the Emperor, that all the crucifixes and images of the Saints had been destroyed together with other objects set up for the adornment of the church and churchyard outside.[773]
The Lutheran preacher, K. Reinholdt, looking back two decades later on the devastation wrought in Germany, reminded his hearers that Luther himself had repeatedly preached that, “it would be better that all churches and abbeys in the world were torn down and burnt to ashes, that it would be less sinful, even if done from criminal motives, than that a single soul should be led astray into Popish error and be ruined”; “if they would not accept his teaching, then, so Luther the man of God had exclaimed, he would wish not merely that his doctrine might be the cause of the destruction of Popish churches and convents, but that they were already lying in a heap of ashes.”[774]
At Hamburg iconoclastic disturbances began in Dec., 1528. The Cistercian convent, Harvestehude, where the clergy still dare to say Mass, was rased to the ground.[775]