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

by William Manchester

  THE POPE, AFTER ALL, was a Catholic, if not a very good one, and because his Church hadn’t changed its view of heresy, one might have expected him to have met the Protestant revolt with a terrible swift response. The dimensions of the threat were staggering. But Leo failed to perceive this; he had learned nothing since Worms. To him the great split in his realm was still “a squabble among monks,” and he assumed that all pious men were governed by Augustine Triumphus’s Summa de ecclesiastica potestate (1326), promulgated two centuries earlier by Pope John XXII, which had decreed that as God’s vice-regent on earth, a pontiff must be obeyed, even when he is a great sinner.

  Leo wasn’t a great sinner, but religion ranked rather low in his priorities, below learning, living well, serving as head of the Medici family, and making war. He was one of history’s great squanderers; according to Francesco Cardinal Armellini Medici, treasurer of the Holy See, he spent 5 million ducats during his seven years in the Vatican and left debts exceeding 800,000. How much of this went into supporting Charles V’s imperial armies is unknown, but Leo was committed to France’s defeat, not because of Francis I’s secret sympathies for Protestantism—he had no inkling of that—and not even because, like Pope Julius, he was pursuing realistic political goals. Despite Charles’s military successes, which would culminate in his great victory over the French at Bicocca, Leo’s only spoils were two provinces in northern Italy, hardly worth the loss of Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia to Protestantism.

  Nevertheless an excuse for a celebration was a temptation Leo could not resist. On the last evening in November 1521 he held an all-night banquet at the Vatican, complete with fine wines, champagne, gambling, music, theatricals, acrobats, fireworks, and his many nipoti, including three nephews and two cousins, all wearing the cardinals’ hats he had bestowed upon them. As always, he had a marvelous time, though the price turned out to be extravagant, even by his standards. At dawn, as his guests departed, he withdrew, explaining that he felt ill. He had caught a chill. By noon he was running a fever, which, by nightfall, had killed him.

  He was forty-six years old. He was also bankrupt. Armellini found there wasn’t enough money in the pontiff’s vaults to provide candles for Leo’s coffin; he had to use melted-down stubs from the last cardinalate funeral. Had the dead pope been spared, Roman wags said, he would have sold Rome, then Christ, then himself. He had sponsored magnificent painting and sculpture, which should have counted for something, but there were few kind words for him that bleak December. Because he had mishandled the Protestant apostasy, wrote Francesco Vettori, a contemporary historian, Leo had left the papacy in the “lowest possible repute.” In the streets of Rome men hissed the sacred college on its way to choose his successor.

  Their contempt was unjustified. For the first time in nearly a century their eminences chose well. They hadn’t meant to; the outcome was unexpected, the consequence of a three-way deadlock. In a move to break it, someone nominated Adrian Cardinal Boeyens of Utrecht, the emperor’s childhood mentor, who wasn’t even present. Rival blocs, trying to outmaneuver one another, wound up outfoxing their own interests; to their horror, they found they had actually elected the unknown prelate, who thereby became Adrian VI, the only Dutch pope in history—“the Barbarian,” as Romans immediately began calling him. * That is precisely what he was not. A former professor of the University of Louvain, Adrian was exactly what Catholicism desperately needed: a reformer.

  In his first speech to the cardinals he bluntly told them that corruption in the Church was so rife that “those steeped in sin” could “no longer perceive the stench of their own iniquities.” Under his predecessor, he said, “sacred things have been misused, the commandments have been transgressed and in everything there has been a turn for the worse.” They eyed him stonily. He moved decisively to end the sale of indulgences, outlaw simony, cut the papal budget, and assure that only qualified candidates for the priesthood were ordained, but his orders always miscarried. Unable to bridge the cultural barrier with the Italians around him—only two of his aides were Dutch—he was thwarted at every turn by the entrenched Curia, and after a year in office he died, unmourned, having been, wrote Vettori, “a little and despised pope.”

  THE ITALIAN CARDINALS, grateful for the chance to rectify their mistake so soon, now turned to one of their own: Giulio de’ Medici, a cousin of Leo X, who became Pope Clement VII (r. 1523-1534). Weak and vacillating, Clement tried to play Charles V and Francis I off against one another. He entered into secret treaties with each, and was exposed, thereby earning the distrust of both. Italy became a bleak battleground. Two Englishmen crossing Lombardy wrote home of starving children in Pavia, adding that “the most goodly countree for corne and vynes that may be seen is so desolate that in all that ways we sawe [not] oon man or woman in the fylde, nor yet creatour stirring, but in great villages five or six myserable persons.”

  It never seems to have occurred to this pope that Rome itself was vulnerable to mayhem—that his fellow Christians might repeat the Visigothic sack of the Eternal City. Yet his alliances with France offended Romans loyal to the Holy Roman emperor, and as a Medici he had inherited enemies, among them Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a feuder, a hater, and an ambitious prelate who had his eye on the papal tiara. Colonna plotted Clement’s assassination. Rallying imperialists, he led a raid on the Vatican in 1526. Several members of the papal household were killed, but the pope

  Pope Clement VII (1478-1534)

  himself escaped through a secret passageway built for this express purpose by the Borgia pope, who had been better at this sort of thing than he was.

  The pontiff and the ferocious cardinal reached terms and the raiders withdrew, whereupon Clement, after granting himself absolution, hired a band of mercenaries and leveled Colonna’s properties. He felt victorious, and congratulated himself. Yet the sacrilegious behavior of the raiders should have warned him of worse to come. Donning the Holy Father’s robes while he escaped through the hidden passage, they had pranced about the piazza of St. Peter’s, mocking the Vicar of Christ. A papal secretary of state wrote the papal nuncio in England—where the devout King Henry VIII worried about the safety of His Holiness—“We are on the brink of ruin.”

  The seeds of ruin lay in the ill-disciplined, famished, unpaid troops of Charles V, who had outfought King Francis’s army, crossed the Alps, and were at large in northern Italy. Led by the Constable de Bourbon, a French renegade, their spearhead was formed of Landsknechte (mercenaries) from central Europe, and the defenders heard a cry which one day would intimidate all Europe, the roaring “Hoch! Hoch!” of charging German infantry. As Protestants, these Teutons affected to despise the pope as a heretical ally of their enemy, but their chief inspiration was less lofty. It was greed: the prospect of plunder and ransoms in Florence and Rome, promised them by their commanders. Charles himself seems to have been unaware of this. His own reverence for the See of St. Peter led him to grant his foes an eight-month armistice in exchange for 60,000 ducats, to be distributed among his troops. It wasn’t enough. Enraged, believing themselves betrayed, men of the imperial army mutinied and marched on the capital of Christendom, given free passage and even food by Italian princes who had been victims of Medici popes. On May 6, 1527, they burst into Rome. One of the first victims of the assault was the Constable de Bourbon, killed by a sniper on the Roman walls. Any hope of disciplining the mutineers died with him. They pillaged house to house, murdering anyone who protested. Buildings were put to the torch. Then the dying began.

  Clement, most of the sacred college, and many Curia officials found sanctuary in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though they barely made it—one cardinal was hauled to safety in a basket after the portcullis had been dropped. But the rest of the population was helpless. Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomized, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than 2,000 bodies were floating in the Tiber, some 9,800 others awa
ited burial, and countless thousands of corpses lay sprawled in the city’s ruins, their bloated, stinking remains eviscerated by rats and hungry dogs.

  The soldiers had come for money, and they got it—between 3 million and 4 million ducats in ransoms alone. The rich were scourged, and the lucky, who could pay, freed. Those who produced no ransom were tortured to death. But the plunder did not stop there. No source of loot was overlooked. Tombs were broken open for treasure, relics stripped of their jeweled covers, monasteries, palaces, and churches rifled for their gems and plate.

  The fortress Castel Sant’ Angelo, Rome

  There was also sacking for the sheer wicked joy of desecration. Archives and libraries went up in flames, with manuscript pages saved only to be used as bedding for horses. The Vatican was turned into a stable. Drunken Landsknechte strutted around in the red hats and vestments of cardinals, parodying holy rites, with one, wearing the pontiff’s vestments, riding an ass. All this continued, off and on, for eight months, until the food ran out and plague appeared. Only then did the mutineers withdraw, having transformed the glory that was Rome into a reeking slaughter-house.

  As news of the sack spread across Europe, Protestants interpreted it as an act of divine retribution. And some Catholics agreed. A senior officer in Charles’s army, while deploring “these outrages on the Catholic religion and the Apostolic See,” commented, “In truth everyone is convinced that all this has happened as a judgment of God on the great tyranny and disorders of the papal court.” Cardinal Cajetan, who had met Luther in Augsburg nine years earlier, agreed. “We who should have been the salt of the earth,” he wrote with heavy heart, “have decayed until we are good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials.”

  BUT MOST MEMBERS of the Catholic hierarchy saw it differently. Now, they believed, they had seen the faces of the Protestant heresy—the fact that half the looting troops had been Spanish Catholics was ignored—and now they would move with just as much vigor, intolerance, and brutality as those rebelling against their God. Sir Isaac Newton would not discover his Third Law until a generation later, but it was already in effect: henceforth every action by the insurgent Christians would provoke an equal and opposite reaction in Rome. And the Church’s reflexive responses to dissent matched those of the schismatics. The same doom, in the same guise, awaited those who had betrayed Rome: torture, drawing and quartering, the noose, the ax, and, most often, the stake. In that age the world was still lit only by fire. At times it seemed that the true saints of Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, had become blackened martyrs enveloped in flames.

  In vain enlightened Catholics urged internal disciplinary reforms, curing the blight which had driven good Christians from their ancestors’ faith—the corruption of the clergy, the luxurious lives led by prelates, the absence of bishops from their dioceses, and nepotism in the Holy See. At the very least, they argued, pontiffs should rededicate themselves to devotional lives, good works, and the reaffirmation of beliefs under attack by Protestants: for example, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the divinity of the Madonna, the sanctity of Peter.

  Instead the Vatican committed its prestige to reaction, repression, and military and political action against rulers who had left the Church. As always, when scapegoating has become public policy, the Jews were blamed. In Rome they were confined to a ghetto and forced to wear the Star of David. Meantime, Catholic princes were persuaded to make war in the name of the savior, or

  Lutheran satire on papal reform

  even to send hired assassins into the courts and castles of the Protestant nobility. Every aspect of Protestantism—justification by faith alone, exaltation of the Lord’s Supper, the propriety of clerical marriage—was condemned in a stream of bulls. Nevertheless the rebel faiths continued to prosper. In 1530 Charles V, at the insistence of the Curia, signed a decree directing the Imperial Chamber of Justice (Reichskammergericht) to take legal action against princes who had appropriated ecclesiastical property. They were given six months’ grace to comply. None did.

  The Spanish Inquisition is notorious, but the Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign of terror. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny. As a consequence, the advocates of reform, who had proposed the only measures which might have healed the split in Christendom, fell under the dark shadow of the hereticators’ suspicion. No Catholic was too powerful to elude their judgment. The progressive minister of Naples, disgusted with the venal Neapolitan church court, began trying indicted ecclesiastics in the city’s civil court. For thus violating the privilegium fori, he was summarily excommunicated. The liberal Giovanni Cardinal Morone was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of unorthodoxy. Another cardinal, who had actually reconverted lapsed Catholics, ran afoul of the Vatican by attempting to prevent war between the Habsburgs and France. He was recalled to Rome, accused of heresy, and ruined. The archbishop of Toledo, because he had openly expressed admiration of Erasmus, was sentenced to seventeen years in a dungeon, and after the death of Clement VII another Erasmian—Pietro Carnesecchi, who had been the pope’s secretary—was cremated in a Roman auto-da-fé.

  In the opinion of the Apostolic See, most Catholic rulers, including the Holy Roman emperor, were far too tolerant of heresy. Francis I was particularly disappointing, and the Vatican was delighted when, after his death at Fontainebleau in 1547, he was succeeded by the devout and murderous Henry II, at whose side lay the even more homicidal Diane de Poitiers, royal mistress and enthusiastic Inquisiteuse. Together they planned a grand strategy to crush all French apostates. The printing, sale, or even the possession of Protestant literature was a felony; advocacy of heretical ideas was a capital offense; and informers were encouraged by assigning them, after convictions, one-third of the condemneds’ goods. Trials were conducted by a special commission, whose court came to be known as le chambre ardente, the burning room. In less than three years the commission sentenced sixty Frenchmen to the stake. Anne du Bourg, a university rector and a member of the Paris Parlement, suggested that executions be postponed until the Council of Trent defined Catholic orthodoxy. Henry had him arrested. He meant to see him burn, too, but destiny—the Protestants naturally said it was God —intervened. The king was killed in a tournament in 1559. His queen, his mistress, and the Vicar of Christ mourned him. Du Bourg, of course, did not, though he went to his death anyway as a martyr luthérien.

  HENRY II OF France had been admired, applauded, and blessed in St. Peter’s, but in the twelve years following the rise of Luther the sovereign most cherished in Rome was Henry VIII of England. Henry seemed, indeed, the answer to a Holy Father’s prayers. The fact that his handsome features, golden beard, and athletic build also made him the answer to maidenly and unmaidenly prayers appeared to be irrelevant; the Apostolic See was in no position to condemn royal lechery. More important, before the death of his elder brother made him heir to his father’s throne, he had been trained to be a priest.

  By the time he mounted the throne, in 1509, he could and did quote Scripture to any purpose, and after the monk of Wittenberg had posted his Ninety-five Theses on the Castle Church door, Henry had denounced him in his Assertio septem sacramentorum contra M. Lutherum, a vigorous defense of the Catholic sacraments, probably ghostwritten by Richard Pace, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, or, possibly, Erasmus. In it he asked, “What serpent so venomous as he who calls the pope’s authority tyrannous?” and declared that no punishment could be too vile for anyone who “will not obey the Chief Priest and Supreme Judge on earth … Christ’s only vicar, the pope of Rome.”

  Luther, replying with his typical grace, referred to his critic as that “lubberly ass,” that “frantic madman … that King of Lies, King Heinz, by God’s disgrace King of England,” and continued: “Since with malice aforethought that damnable and rotten worm has lied against my King in heaven
, it is right for me to bespatter this English monarch with his own filth.” He then sponsored a Protestant conspiracy in the heart of London, the Association of Christian Brothers. The association circulated anti-Catholic tracts and reached its climax the year before Rome’s sack with the publication of William Tyndale’s famous — infamous in the Vatican—English translation of the New Testament, which made the thirty-four-year-old British clergyman an archenemy, not only of the Apostolic See, but also of his then-Catholic sovereign.

  Tyndale was a humanist, and his tale is an example of the deepening hostility between men of God and men of learning. English humanists had rejoiced at Henry’s coronation. Lord Mountjoy had written Erasmus of the “affection [the king] bears to the learned.” Sir Thomas More said of the new monarch that he had “more learning than any English monarch ever possessed before him,” and asked, “What may we not expect from a king who has been nourished by philosophy and the nine muses?” Henry’s invitation to Erasmus, urging him to leave Rome and settle in England, appeared to confirm the enthusiasm of English scholars. It seemed inconceivable that the popular monarch, faced with a choice between faith and reason, should choose faith.