Throughout Europe, the Reformation movement of the sixteenth century brought outbursts of violence and iconoclastic acts, the reasons for which were not always strictly religious. From Livonia, there are testimonies of such outbursts in Riga, Tallinn, Tartu, Viljandi, New-Pärnu, and Cēsis, where they took place during the early phase of the Reformation in the 1520s. Although iconoclastic acts have often been interpreted as important milestones of the Reformation, contemporary sources on those acts are mostly scarce and contradictory. This is characteristic of Livonia as well. The question is, how could a series of short outbursts of violence, which were condemned by all contemporary authorities regardless of their religious preferences, later acquire such an outstanding place in local historical tradition.

The aim of this article is to investigate how Reformation iconoclasm has been described and assessed in Baltic German, Estonian, and Latvian historiography. Thereafter the sources are critically investigated to establish the extent to which the historiographical image of iconoclasm is justified.

Iconoclasm has been a highly emotional topic to most of those who have described it. Eye-witnesses already added exaggerations to their written accounts, which makes neutral reconstruction of the events difficult. In most cases, contemporary descriptions concern only the peak of one or another particular iconoclastic act, not offering systematic information on the perpetrators of these acts or their triggering motives. The theological problem of using images in churches is very briefly touched upon, both in its Catholic and Protestant interpretations. According to some accounts, all images in one or another particular church were destroyed. At the same time, there are testimonies of the survival of several works of art and liturgical objects from the very same churches. For these and several other reasons, the accounts of eye-witnesses cannot be taken word for word. Rather, they represent a kind of standard type of description of an iconoclastic act.

Unlike contemporary witnesses, later chronicler-writers such as Tilmann Bredenbach, David Chyträus, Dionysius Fabricius, Bartholomäus Grefenthal, and others offer a wider and often more detailed overview of the events, stressing for example the role of the evangelical preachers Silvester Tegetmeyer or Melchior Hoffmann in inciting the mob against the images in Riga and Tartu respectively, or describing ritual annihilation of the images by fire. However, the reliability of their descriptions cannot be verified. The aim of both Catholic and Protestant chroniclers has largely been ideological, depending on their religious preferences. This fragmentary and largely questionable foundation has formed the bases for later historiography. Especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this historiography was dominated by authors for whom the Protestant religion was an essential element of their identity and every detail that could be added to the otherwise rather obscure local history of the Reformation was welcome. For some historians, iconoclasm later became a kind of substitute for classical social unrest, examples of which would otherwise be lacking from medieval and early modern Livonian history. As a result, in historiography and in the common perception of history, a series of short iconoclastic outbursts, the initiators, perpetrators, and outcomes of which remain largely unknown, gradually developed into an important event of religious and social history.