Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  In the weeks prior to Henry and Francis’s summit, Erasmus had received a note from William Warham, his longtime friend and patron, encouraging him to attend. Eager to see his English friends, Erasmus had intended to go, but as the date approached, he came down with a debilitating fever that left him feeling depressed and dissatisfied with himself, and so he decided to forgo the event.

  He would miss one of the great pageants of the era, at which two powerful monarchs—both vain, handsome, and athletic—sought to outdo each other in bunting rather than battle. The prevalence of gold cloth in the pavilions and costumes gave the summit its name, the Field of Cloth of Gold. On June 7, 1520, Henry and Francis met on horseback at a spot marked by a spear in the ground. There followed a fortnight of banqueting and dancing, jousts and tilts. Despite the good cheer, however, no formal accord was reached. The main accomplishment was to establish a climate of trust that, it was hoped, would convince the two monarchs that it was better to break bread than exchange fire. The climate would not last long, however, for after the summit Henry traveled to Calais, and two weeks later, on July 10, 1520, he rode the fifteen miles to the town of Gravelines to meet Charles V. Francis was not informed of the meeting and would have been furious had he known of it.

  After remaining in Gravelines for forty-eight hours, Henry and Charles rode to Calais, to another palace the English had had built specially for the occasion. There, in a splendid circular hall, Charles for two days was lavishly entertained. In all, the two men remained together for four days. Throughout, Charles implored Henry for a promise of English support in the event that Francis attacked him, but Henry remained noncommittal.

  For Charles and Henry’s meetings, Erasmus was present, in his capacity as a councilor to Charles. He was able to see his old friend Thomas More, who was traveling with Henry’s court. He tried to meet with Wolsey, but the cardinal was so busy that he barely had time to shake Erasmus’s hand. Erasmus did, however, get in to see Henry. It had been years since their last meeting, and Erasmus hoped to rekindle the king’s affections. As Erasmus had anticipated, Henry asked him about Edward Lee (who had many friends in the English court), but the king was more interested in another figure: Martin Luther. In England no less than on the Continent, the outspoken friar was gaining adherents, and Henry asked Erasmus what he thought of him. Henry’s views on the subject remained unclear, and Erasmus—wary of antagonizing him—disingenuously claimed that Luther was too good a scholar for someone with as little learning as himself to be able to form an opinion of him.

  After the meetings were over, Henry returned to England, where—rewarding himself for all the tiresome summitry—he spent the rest of the summer hunting. Charles went to Bruges, where he spent the last week of July 1520. Erasmus (it is believed) accompanied his court, thus gaining an opportunity to size up the man who was about to become Europe’s most powerful ruler.

  At twenty, Charles still seemed barely more than a boy. He had a pallid complexion and a thin face framed by lank hair. Because of an adenoidal condition, he had to breathe through his mouth, giving an impression of intellectual sluggishness. He also had a strongly protruding jaw, a prominent trait of the Hapsburg line that resulted from generations of inbreeding (and which came to be known as the Hapsburg jaw). Charles had difficulty chewing food properly and suffered from lifelong indigestion. This was a special burden in light of his love of food and drink, and his gourmandizing would exact a heavy toll on his health. No less than as a child, he remained committed to courtly ceremony. He devoted much of his time to hunting, processions, and jousting, often appearing in the lists in the raiment of the Burgundian nobility. Perpetually dour, Charles seemed unable to enjoy himself, except when collecting timepieces (a lifelong hobby) or listening to music, especially the polyphonic motets and chansons of Josquin des Prez, the leading composer of the day. On top of it all, he had little aptitude for languages. Despite his three years in Spain, he was barely conversant in Spanish, and he knew almost no German—a serious liability for a man about to become Kaiser of the German people. (Tradition has attributed to Charles a famous quote: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”)

  On paper, Charles was the most powerful man in the world. Spanish grandees, Flemish weavers, Austrian miners, Swabian peasants, and Sicilian herdsmen were all his subjects. His lands were home to Europe’s richest silver and copper mines as well as its greatest financial centers (Antwerp, Augsburg, and Seville). His domain now extended across the Atlantic to the Americas, where Cortés was carrying out his conquest of Mexico. During Charles’s reign as emperor, the whole orientation of European politics would shift from its long-standing north-south axis to an east-west one, with Spain the center of his kingdom. The iconic image of Charles is the portrait he commissioned from Titian in 1548, after the battle of Mühlberg, where he won a smashing victory over Protestant armies. The painting (now hanging in the Prado) shows him in full armor on a richly caparisoned horse, riding with heroic resolve through a brooding Saxon landscape.

  In fact, Charles at the time was hobbled by gout, and his victory would prove short-lived; with opposition forces mobilizing against him, he was eventually forced to flee over the Brenner Pass in the Alps to Innsbruck—a humiliating experience that left him so broken that in 1555 he abdicated his throne. Throughout his reign, in fact, his power was more illusory than real. His dominions were scattered far and wide, making communication across them difficult, with letters requiring weeks to travel from one end of his empire to the other. The patchwork nature of his lands made administering them a nightmare. Apart from his bodyguards and grooms, he had no real military to speak of, and none of the European princes, dukes, and burghers who ostensibly owed him allegiance recognized him as overlord. Even with the precious metals that were beginning to arrive from the Americas, his extravagant outlays would keep him in perpetual debt, especially to the Fuggers, whose colossal bribes had made his election possible.

  Charles’s paramount trait was his unwavering sense of duty—to his Catholic faith, the house of Hapsburg, and the hierarchical principles on which medieval society was based. From his Spanish grandparents, he had inherited the idea of the Church as a universal and absolutist institution that could not tolerate the tainting presence of Jews or Muslims, and his years in Spain had reinforced his distaste for rebels, mutineers, and heretics. It was, he believed, his solemn responsibility to preserve the spiritual and temporal unity of Christendom, at whatever cost. And that cost would prove high. During his long rule, Charles would be almost constantly at war—with the French, Turks, Italians, and Lutherans—helping to ensure that the perpetual peace envisioned by Erasmus and promoted by Wolsey would be very short-lived.

  Back in Louvain, Erasmus faced the seething animosity of the mendicants and dialecticians. “The potbellies and their shameless scurrilities under the cloak of religion—these now rule the roost,” he observed. Even as he continued to fend off Edward Lee, there arose in Spain “a second Lee,” as he put it. Diego López de Zúñiga—or Stunica, his Latin name—would in fact prove a far more formidable foe than the captious Englishman. A master of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Stunica had been a member of the team that produced the Complutensian Polyglot Bible in Alcalá. Detecting inconsistencies and mistakes on virtually every page of Erasmus’s New Testament, he had come out with his own set of annotations defending the Vulgate against the Dutchman. Stunica was so determined to blacken Erasmus’s name that in early 1521 he made the long journey from Spain to Rome so that he could lobby the Holy See in person. Wearily acknowledging the Spaniard’s exegetical skills, Erasmus quickly drafted a defense. He also reluctantly concluded that he would have to produce yet another edition of his New Testament. With the second edition selling well, Froben endorsed the idea, and Erasmus again embarked on the grueling task of checking and collating, editing and explaining.

  As he proceeded, there arrived in Louvain a copy of Luther’s response to the Cologne-Louvain con
demnation. While cheered to see Luther’s rude treatment of the “doctrinal asses” who had made his own life so miserable, Erasmus was horrified to find himself favorably mentioned along with Pico, Reuchlin, and Lefèvre. To Erasmus’s enemies, this seemed to confirm his part in inspiring Luther’s ideas. If Luther referred to him in this way again, the damage could be incalculable, so in early August 1520 Erasmus decided to send the Augustinian friar another letter. His tone was friendly. After recounting the many attacks on liberal studies in Louvain, he described his meeting with Henry VIII and the king’s wish that Luther “had written some things with more prudence and moderation.” “That wish is shared, my dear Luther, by those who wish you well.” If the current agitation was not curbed, it would surely spark a great upheaval. Nonetheless, he observed, “I shall not oppose your policy, for fear that, if it is inspired by the spirit of Christ, I may be opposing Christ. But this at least I would beg you: not to bring my name or my friends’ names into what you write in an unpleasant way, as you did in your answer to the condemnations at Louvain and Cologne,” for doing so “harms me and does your cause no good.”

  Luther quickly replied. Though his letter has not survived, he described its gist to Lazarus Spengler, the town clerk of Nuremberg. An early convert to Luther’s cause, Spengler had written to Luther to say that he had heard rumors of a rift between him and Erasmus and wanted to know if they were true. Luther assured him they were not, adding that it had never occurred to him “to harbor annoyance or dislike of Erasmus.” He had written to Erasmus and promised not to speak of him or any of his friends anymore. “If God will, Erasmus and I will remain at one.” It was true, though, he noted, that he and Melanchthon sometimes discussed “how near or far Erasmus is from the way,” i.e., the new gospel. Erasmus’s insistence on keeping himself at a safe distance from Wittenberg continued to rankle.

  With the approach of autumn, however, Erasmus faced a more immediate threat: Jerome Aleander. Erasmus had followed the envoy’s northward journey with great trepidation. The two were well acquainted, having first met in 1509, when Erasmus was preparing the Adages at Aldus’s workshop in Venice and Aleander was working as a proofreader and checker. At the time, Aleander had seemed full of humanist promise. With Erasmus’s encouragement, he had traveled to Paris and secured a position at the Sorbonne. His lectures there were wildly popular; one of them, on Plutarch, drew 1,500 people on a scorching July day. In 1513, Aleander became the first Italian named as the school’s rector in two centuries. The pay was poor, however, so he had taken a position with the powerful prince-bishop of Liège. Hoping for a cardinal’s hat, the bishop had sent Aleander to Rome to try to arrange it. There, Aleander’s administrative and political skills were quickly recognized, making him seem a natural choice to execute the bull against Luther in the Low Countries and the Rhineland.

  Before most others, Aleander had grasped the gravity of the threat posed by Luther. The best way to silence him, he felt, was by subjecting him to the same punishment Savonarola had received two decades earlier: execution. Though officially subordinate to Marino Caracciolo, the papal nuncio to the Holy Roman Empire, Aleander would become Rome’s main agent in the north, and his candid dispatches to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici at the Vatican would leave a vivid record of the Church’s campaign against Luther.

  After repeated delays, Aleander arrived in Cologne in September 1520. In addition to being one of Germany’s largest cities, Cologne was among its most conservative, and on September 22 Aleander was quickly able to arrange publication of Exsurge Domine. A copy soon reached Louvain, and when Erasmus saw it, he was appalled. Neither the language nor the proposed penalty seemed to reflect the peaceful spirit of Leo, much less that of the Gospels. Worse, the bull made no effort to refute Luther. The forty-one citations against him were listed without explanation, as if their heretical content were self-evident. While Luther may have been too intemperate in his writings, Rome seemed too imperious in its response, and Erasmus began spreading rumors that the document was a forgery.

  From Cologne, Aleander went to Antwerp, where Charles V and his court were staying, and on September 28 he had an audience with the emperor. It was a critical moment in the Luther affair, in which the pope’s most able emissary met Europe’s most august sovereign. They took an immediate liking to each other. Both spoke French. Both had unqualified respect for Rome and its authority. Like Aleander, Charles saw Luther as an agent of contagion that had to be culled before it infected the whole flock, and to Aleander’s great satisfaction he declared his willingness to lay down his life to defend the Church. He also expressed his readiness to enforce Exsurge Domine in the Low Countries with every instrument at his command. With Aleander’s encouragement, Charles ordered the drafting of an imperial mandate that, on the basis of the bull, ordered the public burning of all Lutheran and other seditious books.

  As soon as the mandate was issued, Aleander sought to have it carried out in Antwerp. No less than in Germany, however, Luther’s views had taken root in the Low Countries, and notwithstanding the emperor’s presence in the city, legal objections were raised to the book burning, and it did not take place.

  Louvain seemed to offer better prospects. At the end of September 1520, Charles went there from Antwerp, and Aleander accompanied him. With the Louvain faculty having already condemned Luther, Aleander anticipated few obstacles, but he faced a volley of questions about the bull’s authenticity. Suspecting that Erasmus was behind them, Aleander requested a meeting with him. Erasmus—deeply mistrustful of Aleander—refused. The nuncio nonetheless proceeded with his plan, and on October 8, 1520—the day Charles was scheduled to leave Louvain—more than eighty of Luther’s books were arranged in a pile in the marketplace along with a number of pamphlets sympathetic to him. High-ranking representatives of the imperial court and foreign governments were present. As the public executioner prepared to ignite the pile, some students added to it several Scholastic tomes, plus a medieval handbook for preachers titled Sleep Well.

  Louvain thus became the site of the first burning of Luther’s books in northern Europe. A decade earlier, the defenders of the faith had sought to stamp out the threat posed by Hebrew studies by confiscating Hebrew texts. Now they were trying to extinguish Luther’s ideas by incinerating his books. And Erasmus immediately felt the impact. The day after the burning, Nicholaas Baechem, a Carmelite theologian, was giving a sermon in the Louvain cathedral when Erasmus entered. Baechem immediately began denouncing him as a fervent defender of Luther and insinuating that the source of the contagion was Erasmus’s revised New Testament. Catcalls and murmurs of protest came from the audience. Five days later, Baechem nonetheless returned to the theme, warning that both Erasmus and Luther would “come to the stake one day, unless they desist.”

  In a letter to the university rector, Erasmus protested Baechem’s remarks, arguing that it was outrageous for Luther to be suppressed by public uproar before his errors were pointed out to him and his views refuted from Scripture. At Erasmus’s insistence, the rector convened a meeting between him and Baechem. Accusations soon began flying, with Erasmus protesting Baechem’s use of the pulpit to incite people against him and Baechem pointing to a passage by Erasmus suggesting that he drank too much. As long as Erasmus refused to write against Luther, Baechem declared, he would consider him a member of Luther’s party. If that were the standard, Erasmus countered, Baechem himself should be so branded, for he had not written against Luther either. As the charges mounted, the rector cut the session short, saying that it was unworthy of two theologians and that they should instead be directing their ire at Luther—the main problem.

  Given the zeal fanned by Aleander and his bonfires, Erasmus decided to take his own countermeasures. In the following days, a fly sheet titled Acts of the University of Louvain Against Luther began circulating, and though it had no byline, its style and content marked it as almost certainly by Erasmus. The whole affair against Luther, it stated, had sprung from the hatred of langua
ges and of literature set off by the Reuchlin affair. Luther’s books had been burned, Hoogstraten had resumed his job as inquisitor, and Baechem had preached in a “savage and idiotic style.” The papal bull printed in Louvain contained many clauses that seemed more in the language of the friars than that of the Roman Curia, arousing suspicions of forgery. With Aleander’s presence in Louvain, “the tyranny of blockheads and maniacs is seething to its height.” The nuncio was accused of an uncontrollable temper, boundless conceit, insatiable greed, and unrestrained lust. Most damning of all, he was said to be a Jew by birth who had “snatched up his pen with the aim of celebrating his master Moses and darkening the glory of Christ, which is just beginning to blossom again at the present time as superstition and the futile but deadly old rites of mankind lose their force.” As evidence for this charge, the document cited general gossip, Aleander’s knowledge of Hebrew, and his facial features (he had a prominent nose). Just as Pfefferkorn in Cologne had thrown the Christian world into confusion, “now Aleander, the blood-brother of Judas, is outdoing even his ancestors and is set on betraying the future of the gospel for only three pieces of silver.”