On completing the Explanations, Luther sent a copy to Johann von Staupitz, who had played such a key part in his intellectual development. In the accompanying letter—one of the most revealing he ever wrote—he explained how he had reached this critical point in his career, offering an emotional account that extended back to his early struggles with the term poenitentia (“penance”). He thanked Staupitz for having helped him understand that poenitentia is not the end of the process of penitence but its beginning. He also acknowledged the contribution of “the most learned men who teach us Greek and Hebrew with such great devotion” and who had pointed out that the Greek word underlying poenitentia was metanoia (a change in disposition)—a clear reference to Erasmus and his annotations. Thus aided, Luther had seen the spuriousness of the doctrine behind indulgences. He asked Staupitz to forward his treatise to Rome along with a dedicatory letter to Leo X.
In that letter, Luther earnestly tried to make the pope see why he had acted as he had. He described how the preachers of indulgences had with their wild claims threatened to make a mockery of ecclesiastical authority and how he had felt compelled to issue warnings about the scandal they were causing. For this, he had been called a heretic, an apostate, a traitor, and a “hundred other calumnious epithets,” and though his ears were horrified, his conscience was at peace. He was now casting himself at the feet of the blessed father. If the pope approved or disapproved of him, raised him or slew him, he would recognize his words as those of Christ. “If I have deserved death, I shall not refuse to die,” Luther wrote, convinced that if Leo understood the fullness of his faith, he would recognize the sincerity of his pleas for reform.
For Leo, however, the dyspeptic grumblings of a frustrated friar in far-off Saxony were of little concern. Five years into his pontificate, the Medici pope was close to realizing his goal of making Rome the center of world culture. “All men who have any gifts in the literary way,” Cardinal Riario exulted to Erasmus, “flock to this city from every quarter as though it were a theater.” At the newly reorganized University of Rome, eighty-eight lecturers gave courses on everything from philosophy and theology to medicine and math, while at the Vatican Library scholars pored over newly acquired rare manuscripts. In the villas of the Quirinal, on the slopes of the Capitoline, in sheltered salons along the Tiber, humanists served up epigrams and elegies praising Pallas’s spear and Orpheus’s lyre, the scrolls of Clio and Calliope’s writing tablet, thus helping to inaugurate a new Augustan age.
All the while, self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking were reaching new heights in the Vatican, and warnings about the possible consequences were multiplying. The most insistent came during the Fifth Lateran Council. Convened in 1512 by Julius II and continuing until March 1517, this conclave had produced a graphic picture of the cupidity and venality that had infected all aspects of Church life. To fight it, a series of remedial bulls and degrees were adopted. Simony, nepotism, and the holding of multiple benefices were all to be ended. Cardinals were admonished to live sober, chaste, and godly lives, and all preachers were to be vetted and discouraged from issuing false prophecies or claiming a personal mission from God. In a famous closing address, the scholar-orator Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (the nephew of the great humanist) inveighed against the materialism, cynicism, selfishness, and general delinquency that had captured the Holy See. “If Leo leaves crime any longer unpunished,” he warned, “if he refuses to heal the wounds, it is to be feared that God Himself will no longer apply a slow remedy, but will cut off and destroy the diseased members with fire and sword.”
On the very eve of Luther’s protest, then, the pope was put on notice of the gathering crisis. He paid little heed, however. Enacting the proposed reforms would have put an end to the easy living to which so many ecclesiasts had become accustomed. The modest measures that were introduced, meanwhile, faced intense resistance from the Curia, and the Holy See remained a cauldron of scheming and intrigue. Shortly after the council’s conclusion, Leo shocked Rome by announcing that he had uncovered a conspiracy in the College of Cardinals to poison him.
The plot was just the latest in a series of insurrections led by cardinals against the papacy, and in July 1517 Leo, seeking to put an end to them, named thirty-one new cardinals—a number without precedent in Vatican annals. While some of those named were duly qualified, being pious, learned, and wise, others had far more experience as courtiers than as clerics and were chosen primarily for their connections or wealth. The price tags for the new positions ran as high as thirty thousand ducats, which seemed a bargain in light of the many lucrative benefices and other preferments made possible by a cardinal’s hat.
Leo was in desperate need of such sums, for the papal cupboard was nearly bare. On becoming pope, he had declared his intention of avoiding the military adventurism of Julius, but in 1517 he had become involved in a financially ruinous war with the duke of Urbino, a small but culturally rich duchy east of Florence. The campaign was meant to be short but dragged on for eight months, and by the time it was over, in September 1517, it had consumed 800,000 ducats—a sum nearly equal to the annual revenues of the city of Venice.
But Leo refused to retrench. He continued to mount elaborate hunting expeditions, to throw grand banquets featuring the flesh of exotic animals, to distribute bags of coins to favored poets and orators. And no sooner was the conflict with Urbino over than he decided to embark on another costly enterprise—a crusade against the Turks. At the time, all of Western Europe lived in fear of the Ottoman threat. Under the leadership of Sultan Selim I, the 100,000-man Ottoman army had for the past several years marched through the East, pacifying Persia, conquering Syria, occupying Gaza, and gaining control of Jerusalem, beginning a period of Ottoman rule over that city that would last until 1917. Racing across the Sinai into Egypt, the Ottomans in January 1517 toppled the Mamlu¯k sultanate. With the heart of the Arab world now under his control, Selim declared himself caliph. His conquest of the Levant marked the arrival of the Ottomans as a world power, and it made conflict between the Islamic East and the Christian West appear inevitable.
It certainly seemed that way to Leo. Convinced that the Turks intended to attack Rhodes and then Hungary, he considered it his sacred duty as the head of Western Christendom to rally its princes and peoples against them. Rather than wait to be attacked, Leo wanted to launch a preemptive strike against the infidels on their own turf, and to carry it out he planned to raise a huge force consisting of Swiss infantry, Venetian battalions, and ships from Spain, Portugal, and England, all of which he intended to deploy in a grand campaign to conquer and occupy Istanbul.
The projected cost of such an expedition was 800,000 ducats—the same amount Leo had squandered on the war against Urbino. To raise it, he proposed a special tax to be imposed on Christian Europe. To help get this tax approved, he named four cardinals to serve as legates to the Continent’s four great powers: France, England, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire. The first three headed north in mid-April 1518. The fourth, Cardinal Farnese, who was assigned to the empire, was ill and unable to travel; to take his place, Leo chose Cardinal Tommaso Cajetan, one of the thirty-one new cardinals named the previous summer. Cajetan accepted the post, and on May 5, 1518, he set off on the long journey to Augsburg, where the Imperial Diet—the empire’s parliament—was meeting.
Engaged in so many projects, Leo took his eye off a major one: St. Peter’s. Raphael remained in charge of the basilica but managed to accomplish little aside from raising one or two small columns and continuing the construction of Bramante’s vaulting. The many demands on Raphael’s time were partly responsible, but so was the drying up of funds for the project. The flow from the St. Peter’s indulgence, once so steady, had shriveled as a result of Luther’s opposition.
Years later, Luther recalled having heard that Leo, on first learning of the Ninety-Five Theses, dismissed them as the work of a drunken German who would feel differently when he sobered up. (The remark has never been verified.) A
fter receiving a copy of the theses from the archbishop of Mainz, the pope did take one measure, directing Gabriele della Volta, the vicar-general of the Augustinian Hermits, to take the necessary steps to silence the refractory friar. Volta had relayed that demand to Johann von Staupitz. Staupitz’s response, however, had been to invite Luther to Heidelberg, and Luther himself had delivered his sermon against the ban.
The Dominicans would not let the matter rest. In May 1518, they held their annual chapter meeting at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, their seat in Rome. A delegate from Germany described the confusion and havoc the friar was causing there. Johann Tetzel’s trade had been seriously disrupted, and respect for the Church had declined. Luther had denounced the ban, impugned Aristotle, and questioned the authority of Aquinas. Urgent action was needed.
To get it, the Dominicans appealed to the Curia. The Curia, in turn, asked Sylvester Prierias, the master of the Sacred Palace, to examine Luther’s theses. The Holy See’s chief censor, Prierias was responsible for examining texts for heretical content, and he found plenty in Luther’s propositions. In a mere three days (or so he claimed), he completed a long-winded dialogue in which Luther’s theses were roundly attacked. Concerning Luther’s appeal to Scripture, Prierias declared that the authority of the Church was superior to that of the Bible and that the pope’s judgment is “the oracle of God.” He thus established the ground on which Rome would from the start oppose Luther—that of papal supremacy and the obligation of all Christians to acknowledge it. Filling his pamphlet with abuse, Prierias called Luther a “leper and a loathsome fellow,” a “false libeler and calumniator,” and a “dog and a son of a bitch, born to snap and bite at the sky with his canine mouth.”
The Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Conclusions of Martin Luther was printed in Rome in June 1518. The Curia simultaneously drew up an official summons demanding that Luther appear in person in Rome within sixty days of its receipt to give an account of his heretical assertions and his contempt for papal authority. A courier bearing both documents was sent north to Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg. Another was dispatched to Wittenberg to deliver the documents to Luther.
The start of summer in Wittenberg brought swarms of flies, mosquitoes rising off the Elbe, the stench of moldering garbage, and a new series of attacks on Luther. From Erfurt, his old professor Trutfetter sent a wrathful letter. Count Albrecht of Mansfeld wrote to Johann Lang, the district vicar of the Augustinian order, to warn him not to let Luther leave Wittenberg, for snares were being set for him. Most disturbing of all was the treacherous act Luther experienced while visiting Dresden in late July 1518. He had gone there at the request of Duke George, Frederick’s cousin, who wanted to hear him preach. Afterward, Luther was invited to what was billed as a friendly drinking party, but lying in wait for him was a Leipzig Thomist, and a fierce argument broke out over Aquinas and Aristotle. Stationed behind the door were some eavesdropping Dominicans who took notes, and a highly distorted account of the exchange was sent to Rome. For months thereafter, the clerics of Ducal Saxony ridiculed Luther as proud and unlearned and gleefully spread word that he had been badly bloodied in debate.
Then, on August 7, the package from Rome arrived. When Luther saw the words “Master of the Sacred Palace” in the title of Prierias’s work, he felt a shudder of anxiety. Here was the first concrete sign that the Ninety-Five Theses had finally come to the pope’s attention. As he read the pamphlet, however, his fear turned to contempt. It seemed, he wrote, a “wild, entangled jungle” (a play on Sylvester, Prierias’s first name, which is Latin for “jungle”). In just two days (or so he claimed), Luther drafted a blistering response, chiding Prierias for his failure to back up his arguments with Scripture and spewing even more vitriol than Prierias had aimed at him. Even more striking than the invective, however, was Luther’s flat assertion that both popes and councils can err and that Scripture is the one true authority. The manuscript was so long that Rhau-Grunenberg was unable to handle it, so Luther sent it to the better-equipped house of Melchior Lotther in Leipzig.
Unlike Prierias’s muddle, however, the summons to Rome left Luther shaken. There was only one way to read it, he believed—as an invitation to execution. He could now see how foolish he had been to place his trust in the pope. Rome would be satisfied with nothing less than a full recantation. Offering one, however, would mean repudiating his conscience, and to that death seemed preferable. Unnerved by Rome’s fury, Luther confided his worries to Spalatin, who together with Frederick was in Augsburg for the Imperial Diet. “I now need your help more than ever, dear Spalatin,” his letter began. He urged him to ask Frederick to intercede with Emperor Maximilian so that his case could be tried before German judges rather than in Rome, where “those murderous Dominicans” were determined to destroy him.
But Maximilian, who at fifty-nine was in declining health and focused on his successor, had little interest in ecclesiastical reform, and after reading the forged copy of Luther’s sermon on the ban, he had concluded that he posed a grave threat to public order. Around the same time that Luther was writing to Spalatin, Maximilian was writing to Leo, pressing him to move at once against the rebellious cleric. Noting the damage that the Reuchlin affair had inflicted on the Church, Maximilian said that if the author of these pernicious doctrines were not silenced, he would soon win over not only the unlettered multitudes but also the princes.
Two weeks later, when Maximilian’s letter arrived in Rome, Leo finally grasped the gravity of the situation. Jacopo Sadoleto, the papal secretary, hurriedly drew up a breve, or brief, for Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg, directing him to compel the “reprobate Augustinian” to appear before him; Cajetan was also to demand that Luther recant. If Luther did so, Cajetan was authorized to receive him back into the bosom of the Church. If he did not recant or failed to appear, Cajetan was to declare Luther and his adherents “heretics, excommunicated, anathematized, and cursed” and to warn all princes, cities, and corporations who assisted him that they would be subject to the interdict.
On the same day that the breve was sent to Cajetan, Leo drafted a stern note to Frederick. From the Dominicans and other sources, the pope had learned that the elector was protecting Luther, and the time had come for Frederick to confront him. “Beloved son,” he began with the requisite paternalism, “it has come to our ears from all quarters that a certain son of iniquity,” Martin Luther, “sinfully vaunts himself in the Church of God” and that, relying on the elector’s protection, he feared the rebuke of no one. To escape suspicion, Frederick should render all due assistance in delivering the said Martin into the custody of the Holy See.
As a devout Christian, Frederick was reluctant to disobey the pope, but he was pleased with the attention that Luther was bringing to his university, and he admired Luther’s conviction. While intent on rooting out heresy, he was reluctant to see so pious a man condemned without a hearing. Frederick thus faced a painful choice—to either defy the Holy Father or hand over a sincere, God-fearing subject to almost certain death. On his decision hung Luther’s fate.
After learning of the pope’s instructions to Cajetan, Luther in late August 1518 sent a messenger to Augsburg to inquire after Frederick’s intentions. When the messenger failed to return, Luther anxiously implored Spalatin for news. Whatever it was, he declared, “I fear nothing.” Even if he were to become hateful to emperors and princes, he knew in both his heart and his conscience that all he had came from God. As hard as it would be to escape condemnation without Frederick’s help, he would rather suffer it than bring odium upon the elector. He would never be a heretic, but nor would he be “captive to the doctrines of men.”
With that, he awaited word from Augsburg.
17
Unbridled
In the end, Thomas More was able to find a horse for Erasmus, and he sent it along with a rider to Louvain. And Henry VIII sent a gift of sixty angel-nobles—enough cash to finance his trip. Erasmus gathered together his personal effects along with his many manu
scripts and at the start of May 1518 left for Basel.
To his great relief, the route to the Rhine was free of robbers, and in Cologne he quickly found a boat to take him upriver. As he sailed along the great waterway, passing castles and crags, Erasmus prepared a fierce attack on Edward Lee. Framed as a letter to Maarten Lips, an Augustinian canon friendly with both men, Erasmus did not mention the English gadfly by name, but his target was clear. He derided the man’s barbarous Latin, his clumsy syllogisms, his softheaded fantasies. He took special exception to Lee’s central assertion—that the Vulgate had been prepared under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and so was immune from criticism. Should the Church stick with a version of its sacred text that was known to be faulty? Erasmus ridiculed the idea that the Church cannot err and that a private person without authorization cannot make a new translation or revise an old one. Did he have to wait for a synod to be called before he could correct a corrupted text? “The business in hand calls not for a miter or a red hat, but for a skill in tongues.”
Fatal Discord Page 38
