Magdeburg Centuries
book
The Magdeburg Centuries is an ecclesiastical history, divided into thirteen centuries, covering thirteen hundred years, ending in 1298; it was first published from 1559 to 1574. It was compiled by several Lutheran scholars in Magdeburg, known as the Centuriators of Magdeburg. The chief of the Centuriators was Matthias Flacius. Lutheran theologian Werner Elert argued that due to its revolutionary critical method of presenting history, it is the basis of all modern church history. It is said that Baronius undertook his Annales Ecclesiastici purely to oppose the Magdeburg Centuriators.
Themes
The Magdeburg Centuries demonstrates the continuity of the Christian faith throughout the ages. As the Centuries put it, Church history shows a "perpetual agreement in the teaching of each article of faith in all ages". Instead of presenting a Restorationist platform, the writers held that "this very form of the teaching which we now have in our churches because of the great kindness of God is that very ancient one, not a new one; genuine, not adulterous; true, not fabricated." The view of the work is generally pessimistic after the fifth century, in keeping with the writers' objective of presenting "the origins and the increments of errors and their corrupting influences."
Presenting a view of such corrupting errors by the Catholic Church, increasing and accumulating over a thousand years' time, served to legitimize the Reformation and make Lutherans rather than Catholics into the true heirs of the original Christianity founded by Jesus Christ and his disciples. Another characteristic of the work is the widespread use of primary sources rather than secondary or tertiary ones. In order to accomplish this, scholars traveled and borrowed manuscripts from all over Europe.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Magdeburg Centuries” as book. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as book. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q565384. VIAF identifies the subject as 16144814261796507534. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1298, 1559 and 1574.
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This entry incorporates text from “Magdeburg Centuries” 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.