Katharina and Martin Luther

by Michelle DeRusha

  My agent, Rachelle Gardner—you never give up, do you? Thank you for your faith in me as a writer and for your unwavering confidence that there will be another book project for me around the next bend.

  Karen Swallow Prior—thank you not only for your insightful words and for so graciously agreeing to write the foreword to this book during one of your busiest seasons, but also for your kindness and encouragement. Your positive attitude put a spring in my step on the days I needed it most.

  The staff at the Lincoln City Libraries and especially the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Love Library. A lot has changed since I was in graduate school. Thanks for helping me locate the books and articles I needed and for guiding me to those mysterious in-between floors.

  My blog readers—thank you for reminding me again and again that you really are eager to read this book. Your encouraging words, cheerful comments, and kind emails kept me focused and determined.

  Pastors Greg, Michael, Beth Ann, and Karl-John and my church family—you live out Luther’s vision for the church every day as you quietly love your neighbors and faithfully serve others. I am so grateful to be part of the Southwood Lutheran community.

  Deidra Riggs, Shelly Miller, and Jennifer Dukes Lee—you were the ones who convinced me that I was the person to write this book. I wouldn’t have said yes if it hadn’t been for you. Thank you for having faith in me, especially when I didn’t have faith in myself.

  Maureen and Buzz DeRusha and Jeanine DeRusha—thanks for always asking how the book was coming along, even when you knew it meant I’d ramble about it for far too long.

  Noah and Rowan—I know, I know, you want me to write fiction. Maybe next time . . .

  And finally, thank you, Brad. In the early stages of research, when I was overwhelmed and afraid, you said everything would come together. I didn’t believe you at the time, but you were right. Thank you for always being a steady voice of reason, an encourager, the very best brainstormer, and my very own personal editor. I told you this already, but I’ll repeat it here for the record: this book should have your name on the cover too. I love you!

  KEY

  Brehna: location of the Benedictine cloister school Katharina attended as a child.

  Eisleben: Luther’s birthplace and place of death.

  Erfurt: Luther attended the University of Erfurt and planned to enroll in law school there.

  Hirschfeld: possible birthplace of Katharina.

  Lippendorf: possible birthplace of Katharina.

  Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach: locations of Luther’s elementary and secondary schools. Magdeburg is also the town Katharina and her children fled to during the war after Luther’s death. Wartburg Castle, where Luther hid disguised as a knight after his excommunication, is in Eisenach.

  Nimbschen: location of Marienthron, Katharina’s Cistercian convent.

  Torgau: the town Katharina and the other runaway nuns stopped in after they escaped from the convent. Torgau is also the place of Katharina’s death.

  Wittenberg: location of the Black Cloister, the Augustinian monastery where Luther lived as a monk and where he and Katharina later lived as husband and wife.

  Worms: town where the Diet of Worms took place.

  Introduction

  The Story of an Unlikely Life

  As night turned to early morning and it became clear the end was drawing near, a small group gathered in the bedroom, their shadows flickering across the walls in the dim candlelight. They hovered over the figure lying prone beneath the bedclothes, his breathing slow, rasping, labored. As Martin Luther drifted in and out of consciousness, his longtime friend, his three sons, and a local minister knelt by his side. They draped his body in warm towels and blankets, dabbed the pulse points on his wrists with herbal water, and smeared his chest with a healing poultice specially prepared by his wife. They held a cup of wine mixed with grated “horn of unicorn” (narwhal tooth) to his lips and offered him words of comfort and prayers for peace. Luther writhed, his face gray and pinched in the faint light. “Reverend father, are you ready to die trusting your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine which you have taught by his name?”1 Luther’s friend whispered in his ear. “Yes,” Luther replied, his declaration cutting through the darkness with resolute clarity.

  It was in many ways a typical deathbed scene, with one critical exception: Luther’s wife of nearly twenty-one years was not present at his bedside. Four days earlier Luther had penned what would be his last two letters, one to his wife, Katharina, the other to his longtime friend and fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon. Neither letter hinted at the dire turn of events to come. To Melanchthon, Luther mentioned the death and burial of Pope Paul III and other brief bits of political news and gossip. His letter to Katharina, on the other hand, exuded a discernible lightness and exuberance not evident in his correspondence to his friend. Luther told his wife he planned to return home later that week. His business in Eisleben was finished, his health was much improved, and he was sending ahead a gift of trout. “We have plenty to eat and drink and [live like] lords,” he said jokingly of him and his travel companions. “We are well cared for, even too well, so that we might easily forget about you people in Wittenberg.”2

  Luther, however, would not return to Wittenberg and to his wife as planned. On the evening of February 17, 1546, the sixty-two-year-old reformer complained of a headache and chest pains during supper. Although he rallied for a few hours, by the middle of the night he was racked with pain and experiencing both tightness in his chest and shortness of breath. His friend Justus Jonas sent for the physicians and the castle preacher, and they, along with Luther’s three sons who had traveled with him, kept vigil at Luther’s bedside. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. You have redeemed me, faithful God,” Luther whispered, his last coherent words before slipping away between two and three o’clock in the early hours of February 18.3 As Martin Luther took his last breaths in his hometown of Eisleben, Germany, his forty-seven-year-old wife Katharina slept seventy miles away in Wittenberg, unaware.

  Katharina had tried to convince Luther not to travel. He had been suffering from poor health for months, and that winter had been particularly hard on him. No longer strong enough to walk to the town church to preach, he was driven there each Sunday by wagon instead. He was often forced to cut his sermons short due to dizziness and shortness of breath. He suffered from kidney stones and gallstones, depression, difficulty breathing, digestive distress, ear infections, weakness, and exhaustion.

  Katharina was filled with a sense of foreboding as Luther prepared to travel to Eisleben. She’d wanted him at home, where she could keep a close eye on him and nurse him back to health, but Luther, ever obstinate even in illness, would not be deterred. He insisted on traveling by carriage to his hometown to help mediate an ongoing dispute that had erupted and intensified between local political leaders in the area. Katharina couldn’t accompany Luther herself, so she did the next best thing: she insisted that three of their sons—Hans, Martin, and Paul—travel with him, and she prepared a package of healing herbs, poultices, and medicinal remedies to send along with them. Still, when she bid him farewell, Katharina couldn’t possibly have imagined her husband would never step across the threshold of their home again.

  Unfortunately, very few of Katharina’s letters have survived, but we can infer a great deal about her personality, her state of mind, and her affection for her husband from Luther’s correspondence to her. We know, for example, she worried incessantly about him during his last trip and others. We also know from the number of his replies to her that she wrote him frequently during his three weeks in Eisleben. In his February 1, 1546, letter to Katharina, Luther admitted he had experienced vertigo and weakness en route, which he attributed to a frigid wind that blew so forcefully into the carriage it seemed it would “turn my brain to ice.”4 While he assured her he had recovered fully, Katharina clearly was not comforted, because six days later Luther wrote her a longer letter, insistin
g that she cease worrying.

  “Free me from your worries,” he pleaded on February 7. Luther tempered his request with his trademark humor, addressing his letter lightheartedly: “To my dear mistress of the house, Catherine Ludher [the original spelling of Luther’s name was Luder, though Luther used several other variations during his lifetime, including Ludher; he also frequently called Katharina “Catherine,” among other nicknames], a doctor, the lady of the pig market at Wittenberg [a reference to the fact that she owned pigs]—placed into the hands of, and at the feet of, my gracious lady.”5 He urged Katharina to read the gospel of John and his own Small Catechism, and then joked, “For you prefer to worry about me instead of letting God worry, as if he were not almighty and could not create ten Doctor Martins, should the old one drown in the Saale, or burn in the oven, or perish in Wolfgang’s bird trap” (a reference to his servant Wolfgang Seberger’s hobby of trapping birds in the backyard).6 Turning more serious, Luther reminded Katharina that the situation was out of her control, as it should be. “I have a caretaker who is better than you and all the angels,” he consoled his wife, “he lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, he sits at the right hand of God, the almighty Father. Therefore be at peace. Amen.”7

  Luther was clearly distressed by his wife’s suffering and sought to ease her mind with both comforting words and playful teasing. Three days later he teasingly blamed the power of her worrying for the fact that he’d had several brushes with death, including a fire in the hallway that tried to devour him, a stone that just missed falling onto his head, “nearly squash[ing] [him] as in a mouse trap,”8 and mortar crumbling around him while he sat in his “secret chamber”9 (i.e., the toilet). “I worry that if you do not stop worrying the earth will finally swallow us up and all the elements will chase us,”10 he continued in jest. Although his tone was playful, his message was clear: Luther did not want his wife to worry about him. He could not stand by and allow her to fret, not only because such anxiety indicated a lack of faith and trust in God, but also because he cared too much about her to allow her to suffer, especially on his behalf.

  Martin and Katharina Luther loved and cared deeply for one another. This is evident from both the tone and content of Luther’s final letters and the many others he wrote Katharina throughout their marriage, as well as from the bits and pieces of their conversations that were recorded by guests who sat with them around their table. Theirs was not simply a marriage of convenience, nor was it a marriage lived out in political or theological name only. Rather, Martin and Katharina Luther shared a mutual and abiding love. Theirs was a partnership founded and strengthened on shared joy and grief, triumph and travail.

  Yet what an unlikely union it was, this marriage between a runaway nun and a renegade monk—she, unknown and destitute; he, one of the most famous and powerful men of the time. Their relationship could be written into the pages of a romance novel. But this love story, one of the most scandalous and intriguing in history, is not fiction but fact. How did this most unlikely, most radical union come to be? How did Martin Luther the monk and Katharina von Bora the nun come to wed in the first place? And even more importantly, how did such a union not only survive but thrive in the face of the most daunting odds?

  This monumental moment in the history of marriage was born out of a dramatic set of circumstances. For a variety of reasons, Katharina von Bora and Martin Luther each determined that marriage—the most radical of options—was also the best one. Not only did that choice impact them personally as individuals, it also had a powerful and lasting effect on their own early Renaissance culture and society. Today, five hundred years later, the impact of their choice continues to reverberate in the lives and faith of Christians across the globe.

  Yet behind the historical significance of their marriage is also the story of a man and a woman who met, married, and raised a family together. True, Martin and Katharina Luther were radical revolutionaries, but they were also simply two people who shared twenty-one years together, until death did them part.

  This is the story of their unlikely life together as husband and wife.

  1

  To the Cloister School

  The young girl gazed at the countryside as the wagon jolted over the rough roads. Since she was more than one hundred miles from the home where she was born and raised, nothing in the unfurling landscape looked familiar to her—not the fields and farms she passed, not the bustling town marketplaces, not the faces she saw along the way. Neither the girl nor her father who sat beside her said much during the two-day journey. Each was distracted by a swirl of thoughts—a mix of fear, trepidation, and doubt. Each dreaded the moment the wagon would arrive at its destination, knowing that when they parted ways, they might not ever see each other again.

  Birth

  Most historians concur that Katharina von Bora was born on January 29, 1499. According to one of Katharina’s earliest biographers, she wore a commemorative medal around her neck—a gift from Luther—inscribed in Latin: “Dr. Martin Luther gave this symbol to his Katharina who was born on the 29th of January in the year 1499.” One side of the medal pictured the bronze serpent Moses carried on a pole in the wilderness, along with the Latin inscription “The lifted-up serpent is a type of crucified Christ.” The reverse side depicted Christ on the cross, along with the words “Christ died for our sins.”1 If we accept this account as reliable (the medal has since been lost), which most scholars do, then we can be fairly confident that January 29, 1499, is indeed the date of Katharina’s birth.

  From here, though, details get sketchy. The truth is, despite the fact that she married one of the most famous men in history, we know very little about Katharina von Bora’s early years, and we hear even less about her life in her own words. While volumes of Luther’s correspondence, particularly his letters to politicians, theologians, and friends, have been preserved, a scant eight letters written by Katharina are extant today, most of them dealing with legal and economic issues after Luther’s death. Any diary or journals she may have kept, as well as her letters—and we know she wrote many to Luther, because we have his replies to her—were lost or destroyed, including some of the family papers, which were destroyed in 1945 at the end of World War II.2

  This is not surprising. Women who lived during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance (also known as the early modern period) were considered second-class citizens. In fact, most unmarried women during that time were not granted citizen status at all. German cities required that individuals fulfill three criteria in order to be granted citizenship: military obligation and an oath of allegiance formalizing it; an honorable means of support; and property ownership—or as historian Merry Wiesner puts it, “war, work, and wealth.”3 As one might imagine, for a single, working woman to meet even one of these requirements would have been challenging; to meet all three was nearly impossible. There was, however, a loophole: for women, marriage was the only surefire way around the citizenship requirements. “Though women were never categorically excluded from citizenship in German towns and villages,” Wiesner notes, “notions of women’s proper place within the family and community increasingly made the only type of female citizenship that was acceptable a derivative one.”4 In other words, the fact that she had a husband made a woman eligible for citizenship.

  In addition, most women did not have the opportunity to attend school and were thus illiterate. The few, like Katharina, who were educated in convents and could read and write were not valued in the same way men were valued in society. Most women (with rare exceptions, as we will see in a subsequent chapter) simply did not have a voice during this time. Their thoughts and opinions were not considered. Aside from their responsibilities as wives and mothers, their role in society was regarded as unimportant. Thus, while it’s disappointing that no one deemed Katharina’s correspondence worth preserving, it’s not unusual for the time.

  That said, primary sources like city ledgers and government and historical
documents have allowed scholars to piece together what they believe are the basic facts of Katharina’s early years, although even the most rudimentary details, like her birthplace and her mother’s name, are still debated. Most scholars agree that Katharina descended from Saxon nobility, although her exact ancestry remains controversial, due largely to the fact that Bora (the “von” signifies nobility) was a popular name during the time. Research is further complicated by a coincidence: two noblemen by the name of Hans von Bora—Katharina’s father’s name—lived in close proximity in Saxony (a small area located about halfway between what are now Berlin and Prague) around the same time.5 Historians question which Hans von Bora was Katharina’s father.

  Biographer Ernst Kroker, author of The Mother of the Reformation: The Amazing Life and Story of Katharine Luther, cites Hans and Katharine (maiden name unknown) von Bora of Lippendorf as Katharina’s parents, basing his theory on a claim that a Hans von Bora assigned his wife a manor at Saale, in Lippendorf, as her retirement property (this typically happened on the day a couple married, which was the husband’s way of ensuring his wife’s livelihood after his death).6 Katharina von Bora biographers Rudolf Markwald and Marilynn Morris Markwald, on the other hand, claim Katharina’s parents as Hans von Bora and Anna von Haugwitz of Hirschfeld, citing a 1998 official statement by the Saxon State Archive at Leipzig, German Central Office for Genealogy. However, they also concede that after the village of Lippendorf was bombed in a World War II air raid, a plaque inscribed “Katharina von Bora was born here on January 29, 1499” was discovered in the rubble.7

  We could dedicate a significant number of pages to the disparate theories about Katharina’s lineage, but this fact would still remain: Although her marriage to Martin Luther and her role in helping to define clerical marriage and Protestant family life makes Katharina an important contributor to the Reformation, scholars can’t be absolutely sure of even the most basic facts about her early life. Everything that transpired between her birth and her arrival at the convent school in Brehna is unknown. The best we can do is to paint her early years in broad brushstrokes, employing educated guesswork and our imaginations.