Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  By October 15, 1518, Erasmus had moved back into the College of the Lily. Struggling to catch up with his correspondence, he complained that ten secretaries would not be enough to answer it all. He was constantly interrupted by visitors, including “several tedious Spaniards” who pestered him for an interview, which he refused to grant. Two young humanists traveled all the way from Erfurt just to meet him; still recovering from his illness, Erasmus was brusque with them. Remorseful, he sent cordial notes to both men as well as to several of their colleagues. Encouraged, students from Erfurt began making pilgrimages to Louvain just to see him—part of the growing cult of the Dutch humanist as a hero of German letters.

  By October 22, Erasmus had completed his new translation. In a concession to his critics, he replaced his original title (Novum Instrumentum) with the more traditional Novum Testamentum. To carry the manuscript to Basel, he enlisted a young Dutchman who seemed trustworthy.

  While wrapping up his work on the New Testament, Erasmus found time to sample some of Luther’s works, and he shared his impressions with his friend Johann Lang (the same Augustinian prior who was friendly with Luther): “Eleutherius, I hear, is approved of by all the leading people, but they say that his writings are not what they were.” His “Conclusions” (the Ninety-Five Theses) “satisfied everyone, except for a few on purgatory.” He had seen Prierias’s attack on Luther and considered it “very ill-judged,” and he wondered what had gotten into Eck’s head “that he should take up the cudgels against Eleutherius.” At this early point, Erasmus’s opinion of Luther was very favorable.

  Two days later, he sent Wolfgang Capito an update on events in Louvain. Matthaeus Adrianus was proving an adept instructor of Hebrew. The Julius Exclusus was enjoying wide circulation. Erasmus’s copy of Prierias’s tract had been stolen from his bag. And, he noted in passing, “Someone writes to me that Martin Luther is in danger.”

  18

  Onto the World Stage

  “It seems to me that the world is exasperated against truth,” Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s former mentor, wrote to him in September 1518 from Salzburg, where he was then living; “with so great hatred was Christ once crucified, and today I see nothing waiting for you but the cross.” Luther had few defenders, Staupitz went on, and even they were in hiding for fear of what might happen to them. “I should like you to leave Wittenberg and come to me, that we may live and die together.”

  Staupitz’s letter starkly captured the sharp increase in danger to Luther in the wake of the pope’s condemnation of him. Though moved by Staupitz’s offer, Luther had no intention of submitting to Rome’s censure. If summoned to the diet in Augsburg, he would travel there and defend himself, whatever the risk.

  While waiting for replies from Frederick and Spalatin, Luther was heartened by an important development at the university: the arrival of the new professor of Greek. Along with the chair in Hebrew, this position was central to Luther’s efforts to remake the curriculum, away from the arid exercises of the Aristotelians toward the enlightened methods of the humanists. The elector Frederick was taking such a personal interest in the university’s fortunes that he had personally led the search. His first choice was Johannes Reuchlin. Still living in Stuttgart, the eminent Hebraist had continued his exploration of Jewish texts despite the continued attacks by the Cologne inquisitors, but—now in his early sixties—he was too worn out from his struggles to suddenly uproot himself and move to Wittenberg.

  Instead, he recommended his relative, Philipp Schwartzerd. Though he was just twenty-one, Reuchlin told the elector, he was second only to Erasmus in his command of Greek. His father, an armorer, had died while Philipp was still very young, and the boy had been raised by Reuchlin’s sister. Reuchlin himself had supervised his studies. By the time Philipp left the Latin school in Pforzheim, at the age of twelve, he was skilled in both Latin and Greek. By fifteen he had a bachelor’s degree from Heidelberg, and by seventeen he had a master’s degree from Tübingen. He began lecturing on the classics, and word of his precocity quickly spread. At Reuchlin’s suggestion, he classicized his surname to Melanchthon (“black earth” in Greek), thus signaling his membership in the humanist fraternity. In 1516, he composed a paean to Erasmus in Greek, calling him the “Greatest of Men.”

  Frederick was persuaded, Philipp accepted, and on August 25, 1518, he arrived in Wittenberg. Having heard so much about the Wunderkind, Luther hurried to meet him. He was taken aback. Philipp was elfin in appearance and retiring in manner. He had exaggeratedly large eyes, making him seem naive, and he spoke with a slight lisp. Four days later, though, he gave his inaugural address. Speaking before a large crowd at the Castle Church, Melanchthon offered a grand overview of the state of education in the West from ancient times forward. After Rome’s fall, he declared, the study of Greek and Roman literature had all but disappeared. Across the West, Aristotle was forgotten, Greek was ignored, and many precious works were lost. With the rise of Scholasticism, fields like medicine, law, and theology had all gone into eclipse. True piety had also suffered as ceremonies and pilgrimages had replaced heartfelt forms of devotion. There was but one way to reverse the decline: by returning to the sources. Through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, both classical and Christian culture could be renewed. Through reading Scripture in the biblical tongues, it would again be possible to savor the teachings of Christ and be filled with the nectar of divine wisdom; the old Adam could be sloughed off and a new man established in his place.

  All of this was pronounced in a Latin so flawless and elegant as to seem delivered from the floor of the Roman Senate, and Luther along with everyone else was captivated. Melanchthon’s address was “extremely learned and absolutely faultless,” he reported to Spalatin, adding that “we have quickly abandoned the opinion we formed from his small stature and homeliness, and now rejoice and wonder at his real worth. . . . While Philipp is alive, I desire no other Greek teacher.” Luther did have two concerns—that Melanchthon’s constitution would prove too delicate for the rough ways of Saxony, and that his salary was so meager that he would be lured away by another institution.

  Luther need not have worried. Melanchthon’s pay was soon raised, and he would remain in Wittenberg until his death forty-two years later. Quickly falling under Luther’s spell, he became his closest disciple. “Never was there a greater man on the face of the earth,” he later wrote; “I would rather die than sever myself from that man.” Yet Luther could be quite callous toward him. When Melanchthon in moments of crisis seemed in danger of buckling, Luther would often cruelly taunt him for his weakness and timidity. But he was dazzled by Melanchthon’s command of classical languages and literature, and the soft-spoken scholar was to provide Luther with essential help in his Bible studies. Melanchthon would also take the lead in redesigning the Wittenberg curriculum. Some of his most lasting contributions, in fact, would come in the field of education. A pedagogue at heart, Melanchthon, with input from Luther and others, would establish in Germany the first comprehensive public school system since the fall of Rome—an achievement that would earn him the title Praeceptor Germaniae, “Teacher of Germany.”

  Throughout, however, Melanchthon would remain attracted to humanist values like moderation, pluralism, and free will, and he would maintain warm relations with Erasmus. Such leanings were to bring him into frequent conflict with the more absolutist Luther. Yet Melanchthon was to prove more adept than Luther himself at articulating his doctrines, and in light of the close partnership that would develop between them, and of the part Melanchthon was to play in the unfolding of the Reformation, his arrival in Wittenberg marked a critical moment in Protestant history.

  In early September 1518, Luther finally heard from Spalatin: he was to appear before the Imperial Diet in Augsburg. With the election of a new emperor expected soon, Rome needed Frederick’s support, and so it had acceded to his demand that Luther be granted a hearing on German soil. He was to appear before Cardinal Cajetan, the pope’s legate. Augsbur
g was in Bavaria, three hundred miles to the southwest, and the trip there would be far more perilous than the one he had made to Heidelberg the previous spring. As before, he was to cover the distance on foot, and he would again be accompanied by Leonhard Beier. Frederick sent Luther letters of introduction and twenty guilders to cover his expenses.

  This time, there would be no happy encounters. While making his way southwest toward Erfurt, Luther wondered if he was seeing the hills and valleys of his beloved Thuringia for the last time. “Now I must die,” he told himself. “What a disgrace I shall be to my parents!” After traveling to a similar encounter a century earlier, Jan Hus had been burned at the stake. Unlike Hus, Luther did not even have a safe-conduct. Trying to imagine what it would be like to be exposed to the flames, he had to admit that his flesh shrank from the prospect. He wondered if his critics had been right. “Are you alone wise and all the ages in error?” he asked himself. The friars in the Augustinian cloisters where he stayed were full of dire warnings. “They will burn you,” the prior at Weimar told him, urging him to turn back.

  In Weimar, he was startled to find Frederick’s party there on its way back from Augsburg, where the diet had just ended. Asked to preach before the elector, Luther offered the usual denunciation of clerical corruption. (In keeping with Frederick’s policy, Luther did not speak with him.) In Nuremberg, his friend Wenceslas Link (who would join him for the rest of the journey) was shocked at his shabby appearance and found a new cowl for him so that he would not look derelict in Augsburg. As he approached that city, Luther developed a severe stomach disorder, no doubt brought on by nervousness, and he almost fainted by the wayside. He became so impaired that a wagon had to be found to carry him the final three miles into the city, where he arrived on October 7, 1518.

  With a population of 50,000, Augsburg was among the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire and one of Europe’s great trading and financial centers. Its streets were lined with stalls selling satins from Italy, spices from India, silks from China. With the diet having already ended, most of the delegates were leaving, but their staffs remained behind to wrap up its business. Cajetan was staying at the Fugger Palace, where the diet had taken place and where most of the top dignitaries had stayed. Because the Augustinians had no abbey in Augsburg, Luther went to the Carmelite cloister, which had agreed to put him up.

  The danger to Luther seemed so great that the two lawyers assigned by Frederick to advise him urged him not to appear before Cajetan until the imperial staff had granted him a safe-conduct to pass through Augsburg’s streets. While the bargaining over it continued, Luther was visited by one of Cajetan’s Italian courtiers, the smooth and worldly Urban de Serralonga. Luther’s business in Augsburg could be summed up in one word, he said: recant. But, Luther asked, could he not defend his position, or at least be instructed on it? No, Serralonga replied; this was not a game of running in a ring. To Luther, the Italian seemed unctuous and high-handed—an inauspicious sign for his meeting with Cajetan. He sent a letter to Melanchthon, encouraging him to “teach the young the things that are right.” He grimly added: “If it please the Lord, I am going to be sacrificed for you and for them. I prefer to perish rather than to recant” and “thus become the occasion for the ruin of the noblest studies.”

  After three days, the safe-conduct arrived, and on October 12, 1518, Luther, accompanied by Link and several friars, set out for the Fugger Palace to meet Cajetan. A massive four-story building with arches along the ground floor, the palace was the most sumptuous modern residence north of the Alps. It had its own chapel, a stable, running water (which dazzled visitors), fireplaces in almost every room, and windows made with Venetian glass.

  Its opulence was testament to the extraordinary wealth of the Fuggers. Of the handful of great merchant-banker families that dominated Augsburg’s economy, the Fuggers were the most successful, and Jakob, the family patriarch, was on his way to becoming Europe’s richest man. Brilliant at turning political connections into economic gain, he had developed a close partnership with the Hapsburgs, helping to underwrite Emperor Maximilian’s dynastic marriages and military adventures; in return for these loans, the Fuggers had gained lucrative concessions in the copper and silver mines of Tirol, Hungary, Silesia, and Thuringia. The Fuggers’ other great client was the Church. As the pope’s financial representatives in Germany, they oversaw the buying of benefices and bishoprics and managed the indulgence trade, including the great St. Peter’s indulgence that had helped spark Luther’s revolt. The palace to which Luther was headed, then, had been made possible in part by the sale of indulgences.

  Cajetan could not wait to leave it. In the five months since his departure from Rome, everything had seemed to go wrong. Because of repeated border delays, his journey north had taken two full months. Once installed in the Fugger Palace, the cardinal had demanded that his rooms be lined with purple satin, and he ate from silver plates while screened off by an ornate curtain. Delicate and refined, Cajetan found the bread too coarse, the wine too acidic, the German people too large and crude. As the diet dragged on into the fall, he shivered in his quarters, and not a day went by that he did not long for Rome, his warm study, and the time to devote himself to his great love, Thomas Aquinas.

  Respected for his integrity and erudition but resented for his arrogance, Cajetan had taken the name Tommaso in homage to the Angelic Doctor, and he had spent years working on a massive commentary on the Summa Theologica. Vigorously defending Thomas against the attacks of the Scotists, he had helped revive interest in Thomism, which had gone into decline. He had also debated—and held his ground against—such intellectual giants as the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi and the humanist polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Though an insider at the Curia, Cajetan was a strong supporter of reform, and at the recently concluded Council of the Lateran he had spoken out against clerical pluralism and profligacy. At the same time, he was an unyielding defender of hierarchical authority, and in Rome he was most esteemed for his treatise On the Power of the Pope. It was in gratitude for this defense of papal rule that Leo had the previous year awarded him a red hat.

  During the diet, Cajetan had done his best to persuade the Germans to support the new crusade against the Turks. In resonant Latin, he had declared that the time had come for a holy war that once and for all would subdue the Mohammedans, the greatest threat to Christendom, and that it was the diet’s duty to approve the special tax that the pope had proclaimed for this sacred purpose. The reception had been chilly. Over the years, such calls to battle had become as routine as the change in seasons, and the proposed levy seemed yet another Roman ploy for extracting German cash. Augsburg was flooded with anonymous pamphlets reviling the pope as a “hound of hell” who could be appeased only by rivers of gold. The diet submitted a gravamina of grievances against the Church that, in its passion and detail, would become a rallying point for German nationalists. These “sons of Nimrod,” it declared (referring to a hunter in the Bible), “grab cloisters, abbeys, prebends, canonaries, and parish churches, and they leave these churches without pastors, the people without shepherds.” Annates and indulgences had increased, and in the ecclesiastical courts bribes had become routine. German money, “in violation of nature, flies over the Alps. The pastors given to us are shepherds only in name. They care for nothing, but fleece and batten on the sins of the people. Endowed Masses are neglected, the pious founders cry for vengeance. Let the Holy Pope Leo stop these abuses.”

  As Rome’s emissary, Cajetan bore the brunt of this anti-Italian sentiment. Ulrich von Hutten, a firebrand poet and fierce German nationalist who had attended the diet and had good sources inside the Fugger Palace, wrote a withering satire that cast the cardinal as a supercilious dilettante who had threatened to excommunicate the sun if it failed to provide more warmth. Apart from such taunts, Cajetan found the diet a maddening muddle in which the proceedings seemed squeezed in between extended bouts of drinking and feasting. The princes, dukes, and bishops in atten
dance spent much of their time pursuing petty feuds, and each nobleman seemed to have a personal complaint against the Hapsburgs that he insisted on pressing during the conclave.

  Adding to the sense of disorder was the painful spectacle of Maximilian’s physical decline. At fifty-nine, he seemed unlikely to survive much longer, and the jockeying over his successor had unceremoniously begun. The emperor was intent on installing his grandson Charles—the same Charles for whom Erasmus was a councilor and who had already been crowned king of Aragon and Castile. Charles’s election would ensure the Hapsburgs’ continued control of the Holy Roman Empire and through it hegemony over Western Europe. But Charles was not yet nineteen and seemed green even for that age. The other main aspirant, the twenty-four-year-old Francis I of France, was a self-styled Renaissance prince who lusted for power as much as for women and who, if crowned emperor, would become Europe’s dominant sovereign. With so much at stake, the competition between Charles and Francis had set off a sordid contest of bribery and blandishments, horse-trading and double-dealing.

  Disgusted, Cajetan was counting the days down to his departure. But then he received the breve directing him to interview Luther and demand his revocation. After three months of contending with the unruly Goths, Cajetan was annoyed to have to deal with an obstreperous friar. The cardinal was nonetheless determined to treat Luther in a fatherly manner and gently guide him to the required revocation.

  Cajetan was by far the most eminent cleric Luther had yet to meet, and upon entering the cardinal’s quarters he was for the first time stepping onto the world stage. A small man about to turn fifty, Cajetan was attended by several Italian curates and diplomats. For all of Luther’s notoriety, the worldly Cajetan found him distinctly unimposing. A fratellino, he would later call him—a little friar—whose dark, piercing eyes suggested to him a mind filled with fanatical fantasies.