Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  As to where the tomb should be placed, there was only one real possibility: St. Peter’s. Constantine’s basilica, as it was called (after the emperor who had commissioned it), had since the fourth century stood on the spot where (it was believed) Peter had been crucified and buried, and it remained Christianity’s greatest temple. The interior was so vast that, as a fourteenth-century visitor remarked, anyone who lost a companion in it might need a full day to find him. Over the centuries, however, the church had become crammed with chapels, altars, tabernacles, statues, crucifixes, and candelabras, and as cavernous as it was, it was clear that the funerary chapel as envisioned by Julius would not fit.

  The most obvious solution would have been to scale down the project. But Julius—captivated by Michelangelo’s plan—had a more radical idea. As was universally acknowledged, St. Peter’s was in urgent need of repair. A millennium’s worth of earthquakes, sieges, sacks, and shuffling pilgrims had caused the structure to become dangerously unstable, with cracks lacing the exterior and the south wall listing out perilously from its base. When Julius consulted Bramante and other architects, however, it became clear that the cost of renovating the shrine would be prohibitive. So, with typical bravado, he decided that rather than renovate the basilica, he would tear it down and build a new one in its place.

  To develop a plan, he again turned to Bramante. The architect produced a design for an enormous structure that would take the form of a symmetrical Greek cross, with a giant dome erected over the point of intersection. Julius approved. The old basilica would be demolished piecemeal so that it could continue to serve as a house of worship even as the new one went up around it. Work crews were hired, marble was ordered from Carrara, and a special quarry was leased in Tivoli, north of the city, to supply blocks of travertine, a spongy form of limestone that was the building block of Renaissance Rome.

  At dawn on April 18, 1506, at the edge of a twenty-five-foot trench cut into the ground near the basilica, hundreds of dignitaries gathered, including more than thirty cardinals; the Florentine ambassador, Niccolò Machiavelli; and Bramante. Arriving in his papal sedan, Julius was deposited at the edge of the ditch. Wearing one of his gem-studded tiaras, he descended unsteadily on a rope ladder. An urn holding a dozen gilded medallions symbolizing the twelve apostles was lowered to him, and he placed it near the spot where the marble foundation stone for the new St. Peter’s was to be laid. With that, a momentous new era in the history of the Roman Church had begun.

  The wrecking crews immediately set to work. Under Bramante’s direction, men with pickaxes began hacking away at the walls of the basilica. Priceless statues were carted off, mosaics were removed, altars were dismantled. Even the great pillars that were such a central feature of the basilica were broken up and carried away. The outcry was great, but Bramante would not budge; for such vandalism, he would become known as il Ruinante, the destroyer. As the demolition proceeded, Julius continued to officiate over Masses in the basilica, oblivious to the billowing dust, chilly gusts, and occasional cloudbursts that made the attending cardinals long for the warmth of their palaces.

  The construction of the new St. Peter’s, coming on top of Julius’s many other projects, placed an enormous strain on papal finances. In its first year alone, the project consumed 12,500 ducats; in the next, 27,200. Similar expenditures were expected for years to come. Where to get such sums?

  The Church was Europe’s wealthiest institution. It owned huge tracts of land in Rome and in the surrounding Campagna. It also controlled the production of two key commodities: salt and alum (an essential mineral in the dying process). The pilgrims who flocked to the city further filled the papal treasury. When Julius became pope, however, he found the coffers nearly empty, as a result of the profligacy of a licentious predecessor, Alexander VI. An astute financial manager, Julius set about refilling them. His drive to regain control of the Papal States stemmed in part from financial considerations. The Church levied customs on all goods passing through those lands as well as taxes on the production of all wine, grain, livestock, and timber; with Bologna and other cities back in the papal fold, these proceeds again began flowing to Rome.

  Julius also moved to increase the revenue from the Roman Curia. It was here that clerical appointments were made, legal cases heard, dispensations granted, matters of conscience settled. At every step, taxes and fees had to be paid and tips and favors offered. Especially lucrative was the Vatican’s control of offices. Over time, the papacy usurped from bishops and cathedral chapters the power to fill more and more positions. Through the practice of “papal months,” for instance, the pope claimed the authority to fill any office that fell vacant during six months scattered throughout the year. In return, the appointee normally had to turn over to the papacy the first year’s revenues from the office (a sum known as an annate).

  Eventually, all offices at the Curia were put on sale, with a printed list of prices. An array of devious practices arose to promote favored candidates. Through resignatio in favorem, for instance, an incumbent could resign his office in favor of a designated replacement (in return for a fee, of course). Especially coveted were benefices—pastoral positions that offered a guaranteed income without any accompanying duties. The chase for benefices became notorious across Europe.

  The hub of all this horse-trading was the Datary. Located in a handsome building near St. Peter’s, it was responsible for the issuing, registering, and dating (hence the name) of all papal appointments. The Datary became a site of pervasive scheming, lobbying, and spying. By Julius’s time, it along with the rest of the Curia employed hundreds of lawyers, judges, canonists, notaries, scribes, record keepers, fee collectors, document sealers, and money changers. The Curia was a place where atonement could be granted, vows abrogated, crimes forgiven, fasts alleviated, interdicts lifted, sins pardoned, marriages annulled, and indulgences and dispensations extended—all for a price. Of the papacy’s total income, about a half came from the fees and taxes collected by the Curia.

  Even that sum, however, was insufficient to finance the building of the new St. Peter’s. Seeking an additional source of revenue, Julius consulted his favorite banker, Agostino Chigi. A shrewd and domineering Sienese, Chigi ran the largest of Rome’s banking houses—a position that would eventually help him become the city’s richest man. Chigi had a genius for concocting revenue-generating schemes, and when approached by Julius, he came up with a creative one: a special indulgence dedicated to the rebuilding of the basilica. Purchasers would be guaranteed a reduction in the amount of time they (or their deceased relatives) had to spend in purgatory. Those selling the indulgences would be allowed to keep half the proceeds; the remainder would go to Rome.

  Impressed with Chigi’s proposal, Julius had a bull drawn up authorizing the indulgence. Aware of how it might add to Rome’s reputation for greed, however, he delayed issuing it. Only in the final days of his papacy, in 1513, with St. Peter’s continuing to devour funds, would Julius finally grant approval. This indulgence would ultimately provide the resources needed to keep the project going—but at an unimaginably steep price.

  As Erasmus would later write of his time in Rome, there were many things about the city that he loved—“the bright lights, the noble setting of the most famous city in the world, the delightful freedom, the many richly furnished libraries, the sweet society of all those great scholars, all the literary conversations, all the monuments of antiquity, and not least so many leading lights of the world gathered together in one place.” But there was just as much that he loathed. The banquets and bullfights, the opulent processions and bloated orations, the humanists with their empty eloquence, “the swill of men who make a living from the trafficking of the place”—all seemed to mock the efforts of the early Christians to create in Rome a see worthy of their savior. The new basilica going up seemed to embody the faith at its most materialistic and grandiose. The Church, Erasmus believed, needed spiritual renewal, not another lavish monument in which to perform li
feless rituals.

  In the end, Erasmus’s stay in Italy would have a radicalizing effect on him, transforming the fussy aesthete who had entered the country three years earlier into a searing critic of papal, curial, and ecclesiastical excesses.

  Erasmus might nonetheless have remained in Rome had it not been for a dramatic far-off event. On April 21, 1509, King Henry VII of England died. Because his elder son, Arthur, had predeceased him, the crown was to pass to Arthur’s seventeen-year-old brother, Henry. Sometime in June, Erasmus received an urgent letter from Lord Mountjoy. He was quite sure, Mountjoy wrote, that at the moment when Erasmus heard that young Henry had succeeded his father, “every particle of gloom left your heart,” given his friendship with the prince and his firsthand knowledge of his “exceptional and almost more than human talents.”

  And if you knew how courageously and wisely he is now acting, and what a passion he has for justice and honesty, and how warmly he is attached to men of letters, then I should go so far as to swear upon my own head that with or without wings you would fly to us here to look at the new and lucky star. Oh, Erasmus, if you could only see how happily excited everyone is here, and how all are congratulating themselves on their prince’s greatness, and how they pray above all for his long life, you would be bound to weep for joy! Heaven smiles, earth rejoices; all is milk and honey and nectar.

  To speed Erasmus’s return, Mountjoy had enclosed ten pounds to help cover his expenses—half from him and half from William Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury, who, he added, “promises you a benefice if you should return to England.”

  Erasmus needed little convincing. Under the leadership of Henry VIII, England seemed poised to become an Eden for scholars—a place where the value of letters would be fully recognized and men of talent amply rewarded.

  As he made preparations for his return, Erasmus was invited to meet with Cardinal Grimani of San Marco (Venice), one of Rome’s great eminences, at his huge palace. In the course of a pleasant two-hour conversation, the cardinal showed Erasmus around his magnificent eight-thousand-volume library. At the end, he invited him to remain in Rome as his guest. “If I had known that man earlier,” Erasmus later wrote, “I should never have left a city where I had met with a welcome so much above my deserts. But my departure was so far fixed that I could not honorably remain at Rome.”

  In mid-July 1509, Erasmus left on the nine-hundred-mile return journey to England. He traveled first to Bologna and then on to the Alps, crossing via the Splügen Pass to Constance. During the long days on horseback, he thought of the English friends he would see, Thomas More chief among them. He mused on how closely More’s name resembled the Greek word moria, or “folly,” and this in turn put him in mind of his friend’s playfulness and wit. With the vanity and shallowness of Rome still fresh, Erasmus began to conceive of a Lucian-like work that would offer a lacerating look at folly and its place in human affairs.

  10

  Self-Righteous Jews

  In late 1510, Martin Luther, while absorbed in lecturing on the Sentences, reading Augustine, and performing his rounds of prayer and penance, found his daily routine disrupted by a grave disturbance in his order. A movement was under way to unite the order’s two wings—the Observants, who followed a strict regimen, and the Conventuals, who were more lenient. Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Observants, wanted to merge both into one body with himself as its head. He planned to have all the monasteries follow the more rigorous approach, but seven Observant cloisters—certain that such a union would result in the dilution of their own devotion—objected. The loudest protests came from the monasteries in Erfurt and Nuremberg. Two emissaries were chosen to travel to Rome and seek a stay of the merger. One of them was Luther, and in November 1510 the twenty-seven-year-old friar set off for the Eternal City on what would be his life’s longest journey.

  It is 850 miles from Erfurt to Rome, and Luther and his traveling companion covered them in the only way allowed for a mendicant friar—on foot. They were on the road for about six weeks, staying in the many Augustinian convents that dotted the route. As stipulated by the order’s rule, they walked one behind the other, their eyes downcast, their hands tucked into the sleeves of their habits. Like Erasmus, Luther was largely oblivious to the visual splendors around him, though he would later remark on the great bulk of the cathedral in Ulm and the wonderful clock that tolled the hours in Nuremberg. The Alpine passes were treacherous at that time of year, with steep, gloomy trails slick with ice and snow; at the Septimer Pass in Switzerland, which had frequent avalanches, crosses marked the spots where ill-fated travelers had met their ends. One can imagine the two men trudging along in the flimsy footwear required of friars, stoically planting their staffs along windswept ridges framed by mist-shrouded peaks.

  Entering Lombardy, Luther was impressed by the fertility of the land, and in Florence he admired the spotless hospitals and foundling homes. He marveled at the skill of Italian tailors, the way people sang and hummed as they went along, and the casual manner in which men relieved themselves on the street, like “dogs.” It was only as he neared Rome and first caught sight of the venerated city—probably from the Monte Mario, where so many pilgrims first beheld it—that Luther’s emotions rose. “Hail, sacred Rome,” he intoned, “sanctified in truth by the holy martyrs with whose blood thou wast drenched.”

  The friars probably entered the city by the Porta del Popolo, then made their way to the Augustinian monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo, where they stayed. After settling in, they visited the church of Sant’Agostino, near what is now Piazza Navona, where the procurator of their order resided; it was to him that they presented their petition. When it became clear that the matter was not going to be quickly resolved, Luther decided to take advantage of the city’s many devotional offerings. Whereas the well-connected Erasmus had earlier mixed with cardinals and curialists, the lowly Luther would experience the Rome of pilgrims and penitents.

  While in Rome, pilgrims were encouraged to make a one-day tour of the city’s seven great churches. It was not an undertaking for the fainthearted. Pilgrims were expected to observe a fast throughout the day, breaking it with Communion at the final stop, St. Peter’s. The distances to be covered were great and the paths through the city rough and often dangerous, with marauders and pickpockets lying in wait, but those who persevered found sacred treasures like nothing anywhere else. At St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, located about a mile beyond the city’s southern wall, the riches included a column beside which Paul was said to have preached and the chain by which he was attached to the soldier assigned to guard him while he was in prison in Rome. On display at Santa Croce were the rope used to drag Jesus during the Passion and the vinegar-soaked sponge offered to him while he was on the cross.

  Most prized of all were the relics at St. John Lateran, which included the heads of Peter and Paul encased in splendid golden reliquaries. On Luther’s visit, the crush of spectators was so great that he could not get close enough to see them. In the adjoining Lateran Palace, however, he was able to mount the famous Scala Sancta—the sacred staircase that the scourged Jesus had climbed to Pontius Pilate’s residence in Jerusalem (and which had supposedly been preserved and moved intact to Rome). Pilgrims who ascended the twenty-eight steps and said a Pater Noster at each received nine years’ indulgence per step. When Luther reached the top, however, he found himself wondering, “Who knows whether it is true?”

  It was one of several unsettling moments the young friar had while in Rome. Like many northern visitors, he was shocked by the ignorance and irreverence of the Italian priests. At one point he saw them race through seven Masses in an hour. “Passa, passa!”—“Move along, move along!”—they hissed as Luther plodded his way through one. Performing the Eucharist, they mocked the act of transubstantiation: “Bread thou art and bread thou wilt remain, and wine thou art and wine thou wilt remain.” As Luther later recalled, “I was a serious and pious young monk who was pained by such words.
” One of his chief aims in Rome was to make a full confession of all the sins he had committed since his youth, but when he did so he was surprised by the ineptitude of his confessor. Luther saw the lavish palaces of the cardinals, heard gossip about the dissolute conduct of the clergy, and encountered the prostitutes who swarmed the city. On his visits to the Curia to pursue his monastery’s appeal, he passed the pay counters set up to receive the fees for dispensations and indulgences and saw the crowds clamoring for offices and benefices.

  He also saw St. Peter’s, the last stop on the church tour. Much of the old basilica still stood as the new structure went up around it. All that Luther would later remember of this building that would figure so prominently in his life were some of its relics, including the rope that Judas had supposedly used to hang himself. As a humble friar, he would have had no access to the stanze in the Vatican Palace where Raphael was executing his brilliant frescoes, nor to the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo (commissioned by Julius) was applying his paints to the ceiling. He expressed admiration for the Pantheon, with its great bulk and the oculus in its dome, but for the most part Rome’s ancient monuments seemed to him nothing more than testaments to the transitoriness of secular realms. Luther’s great preoccupation during his stay was the state of his soul, and he raced around the city like a “madman full of religious zeal.” He was impressed by the catacombs and was so overwhelmed by the altars to faith in the city that he felt sorry his parents were still alive, “for I should have liked to free them from purgatory with my masses and other excellent works and prayers.”