PROTESTANT DIETS. – Assemblies of religious-political representatives of the States of Germany, of the primates of the Kingdom of Hungary, and of emissaries from Switzerland and the Scandinavian world. The principal D. were those of Augsburg (1518, 1530, 1547, 1555, 1686), Worms (1521, 1536), Nuremberg (1523, 1524), Speyer (1526, 1529, 1544), Cologne (1530), Frankfurt am Main (1539), and Regensburg (1542–1621).
At the D. of Worms, opened by Charles V on 28 January 1521, Luther personally took part, while the Pope was represented by the two legates, later cardinals, Marino Caracciolo (1459–58), responsible for political affairs, and Girolamo Aleandro (1480–1542), for ecclesiastical affairs. At the D. of Nuremberg in 1522, prayers and processions were ordered, and a tax was also imposed to ward off the threat of the Turks. Its papal legate was Francesco Chieregati. At the first D. of Speyer, in the summer of 1526, the Protestant princes dared for the first time to proclaim their dissenting faith and to request the convocation of a general or national council to resolve the ecclesiastical question provoked by the eruption of Luther’s reform. The looming Turkish invasion and the disagreement between the Emperor and the Pope encouraged this bold conduct on the part of the Lutherans; consequently, from that time onward, every Protestant prince claimed and exercised the so-called right to reform religion, ius reformandi religionem. From this arose the acceptance of the anti-spiritual and anti-individual maxim according to which the political head of a territory is also its religious head: Cuius regio, eius et religio. At the D. of Augsburg in 1530, held in the presence of Emperor Charles V, on 24 June the papal nuncio Lorenzo Campeggio, while in Vienna the prayers of the muezzin could be heard from the tower of St Stephen’s, admonished the German States not to separate themselves from the Catholic Church and invited them to imitate the example of the other Catholic sovereigns. On the following day, Dr Bayer, vice-chancellor of Electoral Saxony, instead read the Augsburg Confession, which was subsequently signed by seven princes.
Fifteen D. were held in Germany between 1848 and 1872 by representatives of German evangelical or positive Protestantism: Wittenberg (1849), Stuttgart (1850), Elberfeld (1851), Bremen (1852), Berlin (1853), Frankfurt (1854), Lübeck (1856), Stuttgart (1857), Hamburg (1858), Barmen (1860), Brandenburg (1862), Altenburg (1864), Kiel (1867), Stuttgart (1869), and Halle (1872). They aimed to « heal the divorce » between the ideas and life of a large part of the nation and the doctrines of the Gospel, to unite the faithful in communion with one another as members of the one body of which Christ is the head, and to create a centre of action for providing, wherever necessity required it, the remedies indicated by the word of God. The programme was, however, frustrated by the profound divergences existing among the Lutherans, the members of the so-called positive union, and those of the centre party (Mittelpartei). Thus the ecclesiastical D. were no longer held.
974–75; J. Dedieu, Augsburg (confession d'), in DHG, V, cols. 406–408, with bibl. Piaco Chimnelli