A letter from Luther to Justus Jonas not long after Magdalena’s death points to this very struggle. “I and my wife should only joyfully give thanks for such a felicitous departure and blessed end by which Magdalen has escaped the power of the flesh, the world, the Turk [referring to the territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire; the “Turks” were a threat to the Holy Roman Empire], and the devil; yet the force of [our] natural love is so great that we are unable to do this without crying and grieving in [our] hearts, or even without experiencing death ourselves,” Luther admitted. “For the features, the words, and the movement of the living and dying daughter who was so very obedient and respectful remain engraved deep in the heart; even the death of Christ is unable totally to take all this away as it should.”29 Luther then went on to ask his friend to pray and give thanks to God for them, as he and Katharina were unable to do so adequately themselves. Three years after his daughter’s death, Luther continued to struggle with the loss, admitting, “It is an amazing thing how much the death of my Magdalena torments me. I cannot forget her.”30
We don’t know how the deaths of Elizabeth and Magdalena affected Luther and Katharina’s marriage or their relationship as husband and wife. On one hand, couples were aware of the extraordinarily high rate of infant mortality and the risks associated with bringing children into the world. While shocking, their daughters’ deaths would not have been entirely unexpected. On the other hand, we also know that parents who lived during early modern times were as attached to their children as parents today, and thus, the death of a child—and in the Luthers’ case, two children—would have had a tremendous impact on them. The loss of a child often drives a wedge between couples, yet there is no evidence in correspondence, Table Talk, or any of Luther’s writings of distance, bitterness, or resentment between Luther and Katharina following either daughter’s death. In fact, we see ample evidence of the opposite: Luther attempted to comfort his distraught wife as Magdalena neared the end of her life, and he clearly communicated his concern for Katharina’s welfare in letters to friends and to his son. It seems Luther and Katharina weathered the devastating loss of their daughters as they had other difficult circumstances and turmoil: together, through a mutual and steadfast love.
17
’Til Death Did Them Part
Although Luther continued to write, preach, and negotiate political situations in Wittenberg and beyond, Magdalena’s death significantly dimmed his light. No longer the fiery, larger-than-life force he once was, the great Reformer grew noticeably weaker as the years passed. His health was more fragile than ever, and he suffered a variety of maladies, from gout and kidney stones to chest pains, headaches, and increasing melancholia. Overweight and frequently short of breath, Luther became less and less mobile and was eventually forced to rely on a horse and wagon to carry him even short distances around town.
Early on the morning of February 18, 1546, less than four years after Magdalena’s death, Katharina was startled by a knock on the door. Luther had been gone for nearly a month on a trip to his hometown of Eisleben. Last she had heard from him, he planned to return home that week. He had been ill, but his most recent letter had been positive and optimistic. Luther relayed that “the stone” (kidney stone) was no longer bothering him. He was also sending along a trout, he reported, a gift from the Countess of Albrecht.1 The letter was typical of Luther’s correspondence to his wife: breezy, teasing, and full of tidbits and news. It contained no hint of ominous foreboding.
Still, Katharina had felt uneasy ever since Luther had departed Wittenberg weeks earlier. Concerned about his poor health, she had tried to convince her husband to stay home, but he had insisted on traveling to Eisleben to help solve a political dispute in person. He hadn’t fared well during the journey and complained to Katharina that a frigid draft on the back of his neck had caused the vertigo and weakness he experienced en route. (In fact, Luther, who made anti-Semitic remarks throughout his lifetime and even wrote a treatise titled On Jews and Their Lies, noted to Katharina that perhaps the Jews in the town they’d passed through had blown the cold air upon him.)2 Although he had recovered by the time he reached Eisleben, Katharina was not reassured. During the weeks he was away, she wrote him letter after letter expressing her anxiety and concern. Luther responded with his typical mix of humor and tenderness, joking about what a worrier she was, while at the same time endeavoring to console his wife and put her at ease.
As for Luther himself, it seems he didn’t realize how gravely ill he really was until the very end. His last two letters, both written on February 14 (one to Katharina and one to Melanchthon), just four days before he died, were newsy and upbeat. In fact, in his letter to Katharina, Luther was more concerned about Justus Jonas’s leg, which had become badly infected from a wound incurred when he bumped it on a piece of furniture.3 But soon after writing to his wife and his closest friend, Luther took a turn for the worse. He attended negotiations regarding the Eisleben dispute on February 16, but the next day he felt so poorly, his friends urged him to stay in bed. The final documents were stamped with his seal on February 17, but it’s doubtful Luther was present to sign the paperwork himself.4
Luther’s health spiraled quickly on February 17 and 18. While he had suffered myriad physical trials in the past, this one was a much different experience, not only because it was the end, but also because Katharina was not at his side as she had so often been in the past. Not able to console her in person or even write a proper farewell to her during his final hours, Luther was undoubtedly worried about Katharina and racked by his own sense of loss. Nonetheless, according to reports of those who kept vigil at his bedside, the Reformer, though physically in pain, was “mentally alert, spiritually composed, and steadfastly confessing the faith he had come to embrace,” as was expected of him.5
Because of her persistent anxiety and the foreboding feeling she had experienced since Luther had departed Wittenberg three weeks earlier, Katharina wasn’t entirely unprepared for bad news when she opened the door on the morning of February 18. Yet nothing could have readied her for the shocking revelation of Luther’s death. The moment she saw Johannes Bugenhagen, Caspar Cruciger, and Philip Melanchthon on her doorstep, Katharina fell apart. “When she received the report of her husband’s death, this poor woman was terribly frightened and became despondent,” Melanchthon later reported. “She felt especially sad for their three sons who had been with the blessed Doctor at Eisleben, and she did not know how to provide for them after the father’s death.”6
Wave after wave of emotion converged on Katharina at once: sorrow, grief, and above all, fear—fear for her own livelihood and, most especially, fear for the well-being of her children. In addition to her utter devastation and anguish, Katharina was also well aware of the struggles that awaited her in the wake of Luther’s death.
An Excellent Father Lost
The Count of Mansfeld wanted Luther’s body to be buried in his hometown, but the Elector determined that Luther should be laid to rest in Wittenberg’s Castle Church. Still, the people of Eisleben were determined to honor the great leader properly in his hometown. Luther’s body was laid in a specially made pewter coffin and brought to St. Andrew’s Church, where it lay in state in the chancel. Justus Jonas preached the funeral sermon (funeral services were expected to be held in a few of the larger towns along the way from Eisleben to Wittenberg), and the next morning, the procession, led by the Count and Countess of Mansfeld and followed by Luther’s three sons, several of Luther’s Eisleben relatives, and a large crowd of mourners, departed through the city gates toward Halle.
Bells tolled as the funeral procession passed through each village and town along the way, and by the time the crowd reached Halle, more than forty riders on horseback had joined the procession, along with hundreds of wailing, weeping mourners. The procession could be heard approaching from miles away. Progress was slow on account of the massive crowds, and the procession arrived too late in the evening for another funer
al service to be held in Halle. Instead, the citizens kept vigil in the sacristy of the Church of Our Lady until six the next morning, when, bells tolling, the ever-growing group of mourners departed again.
Luther’s body was expected to arrive in Wittenberg on February 21, but excessive crowds dramatically slowed progress. At Kemberg, less than ten miles from Wittenberg, the procession was forced to stop for the night. The final leg of the journey was completed early the next morning, February 22. Crowds thronged the streets of Wittenberg as the wagon carrying Luther’s body made its way through town. Katharina had waited four long days for her beloved husband to be returned to her. She and her daughter Margarete were among the crowds gathered outside the Black Cloister as the procession approached.
Members of the clergy, professors, and students led the procession, followed by the electoral representatives, the Count and Countess of Mansfeld and their entourage, and various dignitaries, totaling sixty men on horseback. A four-horse wagon carried Luther’s coffin; Katharina and Margarete rode in a carriage behind it, with sons Hans, Martin, and Paul, along with Luther’s brother Jacob and his nephews George and Cyriacus Kaufmann, walking behind them. Luther’s closest friends, including Chancellor Brück, Melanchthon, Jonas, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, and Jerome Schurf, along with councilmen, politicians, and more professors, brought up the rear. At the very end of the procession were hundreds of men, women, and children, most of them wailing and weeping loudly or otherwise singing Christian hymns as bells tolled constantly throughout the city. It was, in short, a spectacle like nothing Wittenberg had ever seen before.
Castle Church in Wittenberg, now named All Saints’ Church, where Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses. He is buried in front of the pulpit. [By User:Cethegus (Own work) [Public domain, GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons]
The procession wound its way around the city, through the marketplace, along College Street, and down Castle Street to Castle Church, where Johannes Bugenhagen preached the sermon. Katharina and her four children stood next to Luther’s casket while Melanchthon offered the memorial eulogy in Latin. At one point during the eulogy, Luther’s longtime friend turned to Katharina and the children, acknowledging their shared suffering: “We are like poor orphans who had an excellent man as a father and lost him.”7 Finally the pallbearers lifted the casket and laid Luther’s body to rest in a grave directly in front of the pulpit.
The Good Widow
A 1546 woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder titled The Widow of Martin Luther in Mourning depicts Katharina wrapped in a black fur cloak, a small prayer book clutched in her hands. A long white ribbon extending from her head covering wraps around her mouth before cascading to the hem of her robe.8 The prayer book signified the widow’s commitment to God; the ribbon binding her mouth symbolized the expectation that she would live out the remainder of her days quietly and humbly.
This copy of the 1546 woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder depicts Katharina in mourning following Luther’s death. [By Jörg Scheller (Kupferstichkabinett Schloßmuseum Gotha) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]
A widow during early modern times, especially an older widow like Katharina, who was forty-seven when Luther died, was expected to mourn her husband’s death and, ideally, to live a life of quiet chastity, committed to God and largely withdrawn from day-to-day society. The German word for widow, Witwe, is derived either from the old Saxon witgen—meaning to lament, moan, or cry—or the lower Saxon wedeweh, which describes “a pitiful state in [the] life of poverty and sorrow.”9 The “good widow,” according to early seventeenth-century English writer William Page, was the grieving woman who not only patiently and quietly endured her afflictions and grief, but who also considered her state of bereavement “an exceeding joy.”10 Along with this spirit of desolation, the widow was expected to practice certain spiritual exercises, including prayer, fasting, and solitude, and exhibit certain qualities, like taciturnity and meekness. “If every good woman should be like a snail hid within her house . . . then much more should my widow keep within doors,” Page wrote in his treatise on widowhood, titled “Widdowe Indeed.”11 If all women should be quiet, Page argued, widows should be even more so. Talkativeness leads to “busyness” with men’s affairs, Page concluded, and men’s affairs were no place for a widow.12 The danger posed by widows, as exemplified by the perception of them during the witch craze, stemmed from their independence and relative power. With potential inherited wealth, they were under no obligation to marry again.
Despite Cranach’s artistic portrayal of Katharina as “the good widow,” with her prayer book in her hands and her mouth bound to silence, in reality, Katharina couldn’t have been further from the idealized model of the meek and silent widow. As her grief-stricken words to her sister-in-law illustrated, Katharina did deeply mourn the loss of her husband; yet she did not play the part of the quiet, withdrawn, snail-in-her-house widow. Instead, within weeks of her husband’s death, Katharina suddenly found herself in a precarious social and financial position and was forced to defend herself. Without immediate action, she was at risk of losing not only her property, which was the source of her livelihood, but custody of her children as well. Katharina couldn’t afford to be the good widow; she had too much at stake.
A Chair and a Spinning Wheel
Luther had experienced more than one brush with death in his sixty-three years, yet even after several close calls, he had been reluctant to draw up a will and testament. During his first serious illness, in July of 1527, he acknowledged that he had little to leave his wife and child. Instead, he asked Katharina to entrust herself to God’s gracious will, and then he called young Hans to his bedside and commended him and his mother into God’s faithful hands.13 Luther reminded Katharina about the valuables they had in the house—a few silver tankards, gifts from nobles—but admitted they had little else. “Don’t worry on my account!” Katharina reassured her anxious, ailing husband. “I entrust you to His divine will. God will certainly keep you.”14
Luther recovered, but ten years later, while gravely ill with an attack of kidney stones in Smalcald, he was again riddled with anxiety about the welfare of his family. Katharina was miles away in Wittenberg, but Elector Johann Frederick visited Luther at his bedside and assured the Reformer that he would care for Katharina and his children as if they were his own. Still, Luther couldn’t shake the memory of a conversation his friend Jerome Schurf had had recently with Katharina at the Black Cloister. “Does the house belong to you yet?” Schurf had asked Katharina. When she responded no, Schurf urged her to make the proper arrangements. “Take it!” he advised. “And when someone offers you a pig, then hold open the sack! If Christ has been forgotten, then Luther will certainly be forgotten as well.”15 Despite this conversation and the anxiety it caused, Luther still delayed putting his affairs in order.
Not surprisingly, widowhood generally led to a decline in a woman’s economic status unless she inherited substantial wealth. As Merry Wiesner points out, the poorest households in towns and villages were typically headed by elderly widows, and during times of increased economic hardship, crime by widows, mostly petty theft, increased.16 In addition, widows were generally viewed with suspicion because they were “sexually experienced women not under the tutelage of a man.”17 For these reasons remarriage, especially for young widows, was often encouraged after the proper year of mourning.
However, remarriage was not a viable option for a widow like Katharina, who was older, beyond childbearing years, and already had four living children of her own. In addition, her status and class worked against her. Widows of merchants, for instance, frequently assumed management of the husband’s business—at least until a son or son-in-law took over—and were able to sustain a viable income and live independently that way. On the other hand, pastors’ widows were often able to eke out a living as maids, an option that, because of her status as Martin Luther’s wido
w, was not available to Katharina. In short, Katharina was too important to seek menial labor, but not wealthy enough to sustain herself and her children and live independently.
Luther was well aware of the widow’s plight. According to Saxon law, a widow was promised only the Morgengabe, the “morning gift”—that is, the gift given by the husband to his wife on their wedding night—and the Gerade, certain household items that typically included food, some furniture, clothing, and jewelry. The specifics of what was included in the Gerade varied from region to region.18 A popular adage of the time summarized the law: “After the death of her husband, a married woman should be given a chair and a spinning wheel.”19 Luther argued that the law should be interpreted broadly according to common sense. After all, a servant or a beggar at the door would be given more than was accorded a widow. He claimed the “chair” should encompass the house and the yard, and the “spinning wheel” should include whatever would allow the widow an income, thereby assuring her independence (i.e., property, brewing rights, livestock, gardens, etc.).
Luther’s interpretation of the law didn’t matter, however; it was the law itself that counted in the end. And the law stated that the house and yard—along with everything that accompanied the property, from the livestock to the gardens to the brewing rights—belonged not to the widow, but to the heirs—either the children or, if there were no children, the nearest blood relatives. If the heirs were not old enough to manage the inheritance themselves, a guardian was appointed to oversee the inheritance and make business and financial decisions until the children came of age. In fact, by law, the guardian was responsible for the livelihood of the children overall, which often included determining their education (for boys) and where and with whom they would live.
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