Diet of Worms
Imperial assembly of the Holy Roman Empire (1521)
The Diet of Worms of 1521 was an imperial diet of the Holy Roman Empire called by Emperor Charles V and conducted in the Imperial Free City of Worms. Martin Luther was summoned to the diet in order to renounce or reaffirm his views in response to a Papal bull of Pope Leo X. In answer to questioning, he defended the views that had been criticized and refused to recant them. At the end of the diet, the Emperor issued the Edict of Worms, a decree which condemned Luther as "a notorious heretic" and banned citizens of the Empire from propagating his ideas. Although the Reformation is usually considered to have begun in 1517, this edict is the first overt schism associated with it.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diet of Worms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.