A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance

by William Manchester

  AFTER MUCH THOUGHT, Leo agreed. Luther’s summons to Rome was canceled. Instead, in the autumn of 1518 the pontiff ordered him to confer with a papal emissary—Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, general of the Dominicans—in Augsburg. On October 7 Luther arrived there with an imperial safe-conduct in his pocket. By now his life was in jeopardy, though Cajetan was no threat. The cardinal was a man of honor; he possessed a formidable intellectual reputation and had published a tremendous nine-volume commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologica. Their meeting, however, was barren of results, and since neither principal had been told its purpose, it ended in fiasco. Luther had come prepared to discuss an agenda of reforms, but the cardinal was an enforcer of ecclesiastical discipline. Considering his scholarly background, it seems odd that he ignored Luther’s professorial appointment. Instead he acted in his role as a Dominican general, viewing the Wittenberg monk merely as a member of the lower clergy, who, having pledged obedience to prelates, could not criticize them publicly. The only issue, Cajetan said, was the sentence to be meted out.

  He had, in fact, already reached his decision: the offender must immediately issue a public retraction and solemnly swear never again to question papal policy. Luther bluntly refused. His eminence, incensed, dismissed the impenitent priest and ordered him never to reappear in his presence unless he was on his knees, delivering an unconditional recantation. Then, alone, Cajetan scrawled a vehement denunciation of Luther and sent it at once, by special messenger, to Frederick the Wise.

  Servants, watching this, reported it to Saxon councillors—in that age spies were ubiquitous; every European monarch maintained espionage rings in every other royal court, and the largest and most skillful were embedded deep in the Vatican. Rumors to the contrary, Cajetan did not actually try to arrest Luther, but concern for the monk’s safety was genuine. After a reliable source reported plans to take him to Italy in chains, he was bundled out a side door, concealed in a farmer’s cart, and hurried out of the city. It had been close; the trap had been about to spring. Cajetan wrote Frederick again, demanding that Luther be sent to Italy at once under armed guard. The elector refused. The monk was safe for the moment, but his situation was that of a fugitive living in a country which has decided, at least for the moment, not to extradite him.

  Safely back in Wittenberg, he wrote a lively account of his confrontation with the cardinal and circulated it throughout Germany. To one friend he wrote: “I send you my trifling work that you may see whether or not I am right in supposing that, according to Paul, the real Antichrist holds sway over the Roman court.” Luther and his Lutherans were growing more intemperate in their language, and their private references to the pope were growing more irreverent. The pontiff again invited him to Rome for confession, offering to pay for the trip; Luther again decided that his security would be tighter in Wittenberg. The monk’s peril had grown. The Holy Father and his prelates were omnipotent in the judgement of heresy. Every European sovereign was bound by law to deliver into their hands anyone branded an apostate by the ecclesiastic hierarchy. Lately the pope had become wary of exercising that right. As the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire weakened, it had become obvious that eventually a scofflaw ruler would defy him. But the line was only beginning to blur. No monarch had yet refused to hand over a heresiarch —and thousands of men had perished at the stake for offenses less flagrant than those already committed by Wittenberg’s seditious professor. To challenge papal supremacy was, by definition, heretical and a capital offense. In the memory of living men four Germans had been martyred for apostasy, and the similarity of their offenses and Luther’s was striking. Johan von Wesel of Erfurt, like Luther a professor, had rejected indulgences, telling his students: “I despise the pope, the Church, and the councils, and I worship only Christ.” Despite a later recantation, he had been sent to his death. Condemnation had also awaited the brothers John and Lewin of Augsburg, for pronouncing indulgences a hoax, and Wessel Gansfort, who had rejected indulgences, absolution, and purgatory, calling the Bible the sole source of faith and salvation.

  Luther later said of Gansfort, “If I had read his works before, my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from [him], so great is the agreement between our spirits.” That was also true of the others, and if they had been guilty of high crimes, so was he; he had defied the Vatican in print, on platforms, and from the pulpit. All that was lacking was a formal confession before an official ecclesiastical body, and on June 27, 1519, eight months after his flight from Augsburg, he unwittingly provided that in the great tapestried hall of Leipzig’s Pleissenburg Castle.

  Actually he could, with dignity, have absented himself from the Leipzig debate. The principal figure, in effect representing Luther, was his senior colleague at Wittenberg, Andreas Bodenstein, universally known, from his birthplace, as Professor Karlstadt. Karlstadt had run afoul of the Catholic hierarchy when Obelisks, Johann Eck’s polemical reply to Luther’s theses, had appeared. At the time Luther himself had been packing for the Augustinian meeting in Heidelberg; his own comments had been confined to a few scribbled notes at the bottoms of pages. But Karlstadt, eager to join the struggle, had produced a manuscript listing 379 new theses, to which he had added another 26 before publication. And now, challenged by Eck, he found himself in the middle of the battle.

  EVERY SEAT was taken. Most of the audience comprised theologians and nobles, but there was a large delegation of Wittenberg students armed with clubs, prepared to fight for their professors. The youths kept a wary eye on the presiding officer, Duke George of Albertine Saxony. Duke George was a cousin of Frederick the Wise, but, unlike the elector, he was also a fierce conservative and therefore hostile to Luther. The only motive for Luther’s presence in the hall was personal loyalty. He was a fighter and an able debater, and Karlstadt, though intellectually gifted, was neither. The great Eck was expected to destroy him. Luther knew Eck could do it, but meant to see to it that he left the hall bearing a few bruises of his own.

  As it turned out, Eck carried the day, scoring a greater victory than anyone had anticipated. Afterward he boasted of a personal triumph. He was right; it was. When Luther intervened, supporting his colleague, Eck skillfully maneuvered him far afield, then to a quagmire, into which he sank. The catastrophe began innocently, with a dispute over obscure issues raised a century earlier at the ecumenical General Council of Constance, called to reform the Church, bring an end to the Great Schism (there were three rival popes at the time), and suppress heresy. Unaware of where they were headed, Luther allowed Eck to lead him into a candid discussion of a tragic victim of the council, the Bohemian martyr Jan Hus.

  Hus, the first great Czech patriot, had wanted to see the establishment of a Bohemian national church. After his ordination he had dominated the ancient University of Prague as its rector and dean of the philosophy faculty. Delivering both lectures and sermons in Czech, he rode to a crest on the rising sense of Bohemian national identity. By attempting to end abuses of the clergy, he offended his ecclesiastical superiors. Excommunicated, he nevertheless continued preaching under the protection of Bohemia’s weak King Wenceslas IV (Václav in Czech).

  He then alienated powerful men in the Church and grievously offended the king. In 1411, the antipope John XXIII had demanded a large Czech sale of indulgences to finance new wars. Wars, Hus argued, were temporal; using ecclesiastical power to finance them was intolerable. Wenceslas, who had been promised a share in the proceeds of the sale, turned against him. Hus went into hiding and wrote tracts supporting his position, shielded by admiring peasants. Then, in 1414, when the Council of Constance was meeting, he was invited to address it. The reigning Holy Roman emperor, Sigismund, offered him a safe-conduct, and he accepted it, a suicidal error, for Sigismund betrayed him into the hands of the schismatic pope. Sentenced by a panel of judges, all his enemies, Hus went to the stake as a heretic.

  Had Luther approved the condemnation of Hus, or even evaded the issue, his movement would have collaps
ed and he would have been scorned, even by his students, as craven and dishonorable. Being neither, he replied that even ecumenical councils could err. Hus had been right, he said; his doctrines had been sound; those who had broken faith with him, and then damned him, had behaved shamefully and disgraced the Church.

  It was a brave reply. It was also calamitous. His differences with Rome had begun with a minor dispute over indulgences. Now he had challenged pontifical authority over Christendom, revealing himself before all Europe as an unshriven, unrepentant apostate. He knew it, and as he left Pleissenburg Castle, surrounded by his vigilant students, he was a badly shaken man.

  ON THE DAY FOLLOWING Luther’s humiliation, the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire met in Frankfurt am Main to choose a new emperor, Maximilian having died six months earlier. The identity of the successor to der gross Max was far more engrossing to Pope Leo than the incipient split in the Catholic Church—a demonstration of how hopelessly the pontiff’s priorities were askew. Historians agree that Luther could have been swiftly crushed had the pope moved decisively in his role as Vicar of Christ, the spiritual head of Christendom. Instead he dallied, vacillated, became engrossed in minor matters, and spent too many late evenings with his books. Leo X was no Borgia. In many ways he was more admirable than Martin Luther. Head of the Medici family, a poet and a man of honor, he was a leading patron of the Renaissance, a connoisseur of art, a scholar steeped in classical literature, and a pontiff tolerant enough to chuckle as he read the satires of Erasmus, appreciative that the humanist had observed the gentlemanly rule under which learned men of that time were free to write as they pleased, provided they confined themselves to Latin, leaving the unlettered masses undisturbed.

  Those closest to the pope agreed that he was afflicted by three weaknesses: he was superficial, a spendthrift, and he lacked judgment. His poor judgment was to be his undoing, and it contributed heavily to the undoing of his Church. In the absence of decisive pontifical action, the Wittenberg abscess was spreading steadily. Oblivious to it, Leo waited nearly three years after the posting of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses before issuing an ultimatum to their author. Meantime the situation within Germany had changed radically.

  A pope who took his responsibilities more seriously would have stifled the revolt before the end of 1517 by ordering Frederick III to silence the mutinous Augustinian, imprison him, or cremate him. But Leo, for purely secular reasons, was courting Frederick. It had been clear for some time that the reign of the great Max was nearing its end. Any European prince was eligible to succeed him. The three obvious candidates, all mighty kings, were Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and young Carlos I of Spain.

  Henry could be omitted. He lacked the wealth to compete in the election, and he wasn’t much interested anyhow. Real power, not the illusion of it, attracted the vigorous British monarch, and he knew that despite its lustrous name the glitter of the imperial realm was fading. It was better known now as die Romaisches Reich deutscher Nation, a loose confederation whose leader, limited in his sovereignty, was voted into office by the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; the count palatine of the Rhine; the king of Bohemia; the margrave of Brandenburg—and the duke of Saxony, then Frederick III, Luther’s patron.

  Unlike Henry, the kings of France and Spain coveted the imperial title. Though reduced to a symbol, it was deeply invested with tradition and tied to the papacy in a hundred ways; as Maximilian had demonstrated, a shrewd diplomat could achieve much by manipulating its panoply. But Pope Leo wanted neither Charles nor Francis. The new emperor, if able, would control Germany, and any king who could unite Germany with either France or Spain would destroy the European balance of power that had preserved the shaky autonomy of the Italian states since 1494. Leo preferred a minor prince, and because Frederick of Saxony was the senior member of the electoral college, he settled on him. That explains his deference toward Frederick’s lenient treatment of Luther. No other pontiff would have sent a cardinal to bargain with a monk—Cardinal Cajetan had misunderstood his mission to Augsburg, because it was, by all precedents, inexplicable—and none other would have tolerated the stream of abusive Lutheran pamphlets now issuing from Wittenberg. Committed to Frederick, Leo had even dispatched Von Miltitz to Wittenberg to offer him “the Golden Rose,” an award popes conferred on princes as a sign of their highest favor. Leo hoped that would improve the Saxon elector’s chances at Frankfurt am Main. Frederick, a man of honor, dismissed Miltitz and sent him back to Rome.

  It had been a footling gesture. Carlos of Spain was not to be denied. He was prepared to become Emperor Charles V the way Borgia had become pope—by buying the imperial crown. He went deeply into debt to do it, but he had a lot of collateral. He ruled, not only Spain, but also Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Spain’s possessions abroad, the Habsburg holdings in Austria, the Netherlands, Flanders, and Franche-Comté. Still, the empire, though shopworn, did not come cheap; his Trinkgeld—bribes to electors who put their votes on the market—came to 850,000 ducats, of which he had borrowed 543,000 from the Fuggers.

  German strength, which would prove indispensable to Luther, owed much to the new prosperity powered by the formidable Fuggers and their fellow merchants. Unintimidated by rank, they insisted that they be paid what was owed them, and on time; when the new emperor fell in arrears, Jakob Fugger II threatened to expose him: “It is well known that your Majesty without me might not have acquired the imperial honor, as I can attest with the written statements of all the delegates,” he wrote, threatening to do exactly that unless Charles immediately issued an “order that the money which I have paid out, together with the interest on

  Emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) (1500–1558)

  it, shall be repaid without further delay.” Charles paid—mostly by giving Fugger the right to collect various royal revenues in Spain.

  CHARLES HAD BEEN ELECTED, but his coronation was more than a year away. That was long enough to form alliances, declare and win wars, unseat dynasties —or nullify the choice of an emperorelect. Pope Leo, stubbornly refusing to concede defeat, continued to neglect his office, by persevering in his courtship of Frederick the Wise. He seemed prepared to endure the Wittenberg insubordination indefinitely, trusting that this lesser issue, which is how he regarded it, would yield to a peaceful solution. Lutheran ambivalence encouraged him in this. Even before Leipzig, Luther had been suffering through what might be called an identity crisis. He had been trying to define the papacy and his relationship to it. Meeting Von Miltitz in Altenburg in January 1919, he had appeared anxious to preserve the unity of Christendom, offering to remain mute if his critics would also. He was prepared to issue public statements acknowledging the wisdom of praying to saints and the reality of purgatory. He was also willing to urge his followers to make peace with the Church, and would even concede the usefulness of indulgences in remitting canonical penances. To Tetzel, lying on a monastic deathbed, he sent a gentle note, assuring him that the issue between them had been a minor incident in a larger controversy, “that the affair had not been begun on that account, but that the child had quite another father.” In March he even sent the pontiff a letter of submission.

  This was young Luther redux—a flashback to the moment when, as a twenty-eight-year-old monk, he had first glimpsed the capital of Catholicism and prostrated himself. Then a devout pilgrim, he had genuflected before saintly relics, worshiped at every Roman altar, and scaled the Scala Santa on his knees. Now he wrote the Holy See in the same exalted mood. The response from the Vatican, prompt and friendly, invited him to Rome for confession. But by then Luther’s inner struggle had resolved itself. Leo’s overture was declined once more. Wittenberg, after all, was still safer for an avowed recreant, and as the dark doppelganger within him reformed, he made his final, irrevocable turn away from Rome. The Luther who would make history was reemerging: willful, selfless, intolerant, pious, brilliant, contemptuous of learning and art, but powerful in conviction and driven by a vision of pure, une
xploited Christianity.

  In a brief, insightful passage he grasped this side of his temperament: “I have been born to war, and fight with factions and devils; therefore my books are stormy and warlike. I must root out the stumps and stocks, cut away the thorns and hedges, fill up the ditches, and am the rough forester to break a path and make things ready.” Thus, within a month of repledging his allegiance to the Holy Father he wrote Georg Spalatin, chaplain to Frederick: “I am at a loss to know whether the Pope is Antichrist or his apostle.” And in a more moderate but nevertheless revolutionary note, he suggested: “A common reformation should be undertaken of the spiritual and temporal estates.” *

  His followers, like him, were angry men; wrath was a red thread binding the Lutherans together. More and more—and especially after Leipzig—they resembled an insurgent army, with Wittenberg as its command post and new hymns which sounded like marches. Some members of his retinue left memorable contributions to polemical literature, but none could match the vehemence of their leader when fully aroused. After reading the Curia’s continuing, uncompromising, absolute claims for the primacy and power of Catholic pontiffs, he published an Epitome which opened by describing Rome as “that empurpled Babylon” and the Curia as “the Synagogue of Satan.” Three years earlier he would have been shocked to read such a diatribe, let alone write it himself. Now it was only an overture.