Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

But the advocates of reform in Basel were growing in both number and fervor. They were concentrated in the Steinenvorstadt, a working-class district in the center of town that was home to many weavers and other laborers who felt marginalized by the oligarchs—both secular and ecclesiastical—who ruled the town. For them, religious and political reform went hand in hand, and they were noisily demanding both. Leading the way was Oecolampadius. In a measure of the fury being generated by the dispute over the Eucharist, Oecolampadius in early 1527 came out with a pamphlet declaring that the blasphemous conduct of the servants of the Mass was worse than robbery, whoring, adultery, treason, manslaughter, and murder. In October, four hundred evangelicals held a rally to demand that the town council abolish the Catholic Mass in Basel’s churches. The councilors refused, maintaining that all citizens should be free to follow their conscience and worship as they saw fit.

  The agitation continued, however, and on April 15, 1528 (Good Friday), a group of iconoclasts barged into two of the city’s churches and removed pictures from them. The next day, town councilors had the activists arrested and placed in chains, but two hundred citizens protested so loudly that they were quickly released. Hoping to restore calm, the council issued an order stating that “no man should call another papist or Lutheran, heretic or adherent of the new faith or of the old, but that each should be left unembarrassed and unscorned in the exercise of his own belief.”

  This only incited the reformers further, however. Shortly before Christmas, a group of guild members sent the council a petition demanding that the evangelical faith be declared the only acceptable one. As discontent spread, mediators were summoned from Strasbourg and other Swiss cantons. With their help, the council on January 5, 1529, decreed that from then on all preaching was to be based solely on the Bible—a concession to the reformers—while, in a nod to the Catholics, Mass was to be celebrated once a day in three churches. This pleased no one. Catholic priests refused to accept the quota on Masses, while evangelicals issued defamatory leaflets demanding that the Mass be abolished altogether.

  Before dawn on February 8, some eight hundred mostly poor citizens gathered in the Franciscan church in the center of Basel and elected a committee to press the council to abolish the Mass, dismiss its Catholic members, and adopt democratic reforms. The council convened in the town hall on the marketplace to deliberate. When by nightfall no decision had been reached, a thousand demonstrators gathered in the square, built a huge bonfire, put brass crossbows in place, and planted a cannon in front of the hall. Catholics organized a counterdemonstration.

  After noon the next day, forty armed men, unwilling to wait any longer, marched up the hill to the Münster and surged in. A clumsy guild member tipped over an altarpiece with a halberd, causing it to shatter. When the men left to get reinforcements, the chaplains locked the church. A loud and raucous crowd of about two hundred reappeared and, forcing their way in, began smashing and hacking crucifixes, altars, and images of the Virgin Mary and the saints. The iconoclasts then fanned out to other churches and carried out similar sprees. The next morning, Basel looked out on shards of statues, shreds of canvases, stumps of candelabra, and other remnants of centuries of Catholic devotion.

  Terrified, the Catholic members of the council resigned. Nearly all of the professors at the university relinquished their posts and left town. The burgomaster escaped at night by boat; had he remained, he would probably have been hanged. With angry crowds still occupying the marketplace, the new pro-reform council oversaw a more thorough, and orderly, cleansing of the churches. As Erasmus described the scene to Willibald Pirckheimer,

  The dissidents, with the assistance of workmen and artisans, removed from the churches whatever they pleased. . . . No statues were left in the churches, or in vestibules, or cloisters, or monasteries. All painted images were covered over with whitewash. Anything that would burn was thrown on the fire; what would not burn was torn into shreds. Neither value nor artistic merit ensured that an object would be spared. Soon the Mass was totally prohibited; it was not even permissible to celebrate the sacred rite at home or attend it in a neighboring village.

  Erasmus was relieved that no houses had been broken into and no blood shed, but, as he laconically summed up the transfer of power, “Oecolampadius is taking over all the churches.” On April 1, 1529, the approval of a Reform Ordinance made it official: Basel had joined the Reformation. From then on, people could attend only reformed services, and all monks and nuns had to abandon their habits. Those who missed Sunday sermons without good cause had to pay a substantial fine.

  By that point, Erasmus had had enough. The sense of openness that had attracted him to Basel was gone. Without a sympathetic town council to protect him, he felt that he would be at the mercy of the mob. And if he stayed, he would be seen as having endorsed the change. So, despite his advancing age and declining health, he decided to leave the city that had been his home for the last eight years.

  But where to go? Erasmus had many options. From Henry VIII he had received an effusive letter asking him to settle in England. (“Our love for you . . . has reached such magnitude as to exceed all bounds,” the king gushed.) But Erasmus dreaded the thought of making another Channel crossing and, once in England, of becoming entangled in Henry’s messy divorce. Charles V had repeatedly invited him to Spain, but that land was too distant, hot, and teeming with hostile monks. Ferdinand had offered a salary of four hundred florins a year if he moved to Vienna; King Sigismund was trying to lure him to Poland; and Margaret, the regent of the Netherlands, was urging him to return to his native land. While reveling in such royal regard, Erasmus recoiled at the thought of becoming a courtier.

  In the end, he decided on Freiburg. Just forty miles to the north, it was a quiet university town within a day’s journey of the Froben presses. Located in territory ruled by Ferdinand and the Hapsburgs, it was solidly Catholic. From Ferdinand, Erasmus obtained a letter of recommendation and a guarantee of safe passage through Hapsburg lands. He quietly sent ahead his money and furniture.

  When his intention to leave Basel became known, there was an outcry. Erasmus’s presence in the city had been a source of great pride, and to lose him would dim its reputation as a seat of letters and learning. Oecolampadius was especially upset. Since 1515, when he had helped Erasmus with his landmark New Testament, he had looked up to him, and he continued to do so despite their theological differences. When Erasmus heard of his distress, he invited him for a conversation. It took place in Froben’s garden on or about the afternoon of April 10, 1529. Oecolampadius pressed him to change his mind, but Erasmus noted that he had already sent ahead his possessions. They parted with a friendly handshake.

  Erasmus wanted to leave from a secluded dock so as to avoid “a public spectacle,” but the council insisted that he use the customary embarkation point at the Rhine Bridge in the center of town. On April 13, Erasmus arrived with a few friends who were to accompany him on his journey. At the last moment, he composed a quatrain expressing his gratitude for all the hospitality that the city had shown him:

  Basel, farewell. No other city made

  Me half so welcome now for many a year.

  I wish you well, and may no future guest

  More dreadful than Erasmus settle here.

  He and his friends then boarded the boat, and a small crowd watched in melancholy silence as Europe’s most famous scholar disappeared around the great bend of the Rhine on his way north to Catholic Germany.

  41

  The Crack-Up

  In Wittenberg, Luther was becoming something of a homebody. Exhausted by the raging battles over doctrine and authority, he was devoting more and more time to his responsibilities as a husband and a father. Even in that capacity, though, he could not avoid attracting attention. With monasteries emptying, celibacy declining, and monks and nuns marrying, the new evangelical clergy looked to him for guidance.

  The Black Cloister, where dark-robed monks once shuffled in silence, was now a place
of bustle and commotion as the Luther family rapidly expanded. On December 10, 1527, Katharina gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Sadly, she would die the following August, but in May 1529 another daughter, Magdalena, arrived. (The Luthers would have six children in all, four of whom would survive into adulthood.) When Luther’s sister Margarete died that same year, her four children came to live in the cloister. They were later joined by Katharina’s aunt, Magdalene von Bora, as well as two nephews and a grandniece of Katharina’s. At one point, sixteen Luther children were living in the cloister. Young Hans, now walking and talking, often barged into his father’s study and began singing. “If it gets too loud I scold him some,” Martin affectionately observed. “He goes on singing just the same, but he does it more furtively, becoming rather anxious and shy.”

  Luther also put up many runaway monks and nuns until they could find permanent lodging. Because Wittenberg had few inns, dignitaries visiting the town often stayed at the Black Cloister, hoping to meet him. One prince preparing to visit was, however, warned that “an odd assortment of young people, students, young girls, widows, old women and children lives in the Doctor’s home; this makes for great disquiet in the house, and there are many who pity Luther because of it.”

  A number of the cloister’s forty cells were now occupied by students, who, in return for lodging and meals, either tutored the children or paid a modest fee—a welcome supplement to the tight Luther budget. The main meal was usually served at ten in the morning, with a light supper offered at five in the afternoon. Luther was always the center of attention, speaking in a mix of Latin (on theological topics) and German (on everyday ones). Some of the young men at the table began taking notes. After Luther’s death, a thick folio of this Table Talk would appear. (The Weimar edition has about seven thousand entries in six volumes.) Sometimes rude, often coarse, always frank, the Tischreden would embarrass generations of Protestants, but the unexpurgated version offers a bracing look into the mind of one of history’s titans as he held forth on everything from Scripture and doctrine to local customs and national characteristics.

  The German people, Luther remarked on one occasion, are “simpler and more attached to the truth than Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, and Englishmen.” The German tongue was the best of all, though there were so many dialects that the Germans often did not understand one another. Their greatest vice was drinking—“a disgraceful nuisance” that “injures body, soul, and goods.” Whoever invented the brewing of beer had set a curse on the German people. Luther disliked German tailors, who seemed careless and used too much cloth without giving the proper shape; Italian tailors were far superior. He disliked lawyers of every nationality, believing that most were greedy and robbed their clients blind. “If I had a hundred sons,” he said, “I wouldn’t bring up one of them to be a lawyer.”

  A frequent presence in the Table Talk is Tölpel, Luther’s beloved dog. “Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches meat!” he observed. “All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat.” On the subject of heretics and opponents, Luther said that he found them useful. Johann Eck, for one, “made me wide awake.” He “gave me my first ideas, and without him I would never have got this far.” For Jerome, by contrast, Luther felt only disgust: “I know no doctor whom I hate so much, although I once loved him ardently and read him voraciously. . . . Surely there’s more learning in Aesop than in all of Jerome.”

  Luther despised Erasmus most of all. No other contemporary appears in the Table Talk as often or in as negative a light. “Erasmus is an eel. Nobody can grasp him except Christ alone. He is a double-dealing man.” He had “corrupted the youth with the wicked opinions he expressed in his colloquies. God keep him in check!” Erasmus did not think that God is in any way superior to man and would not acknowledge that the Holy Scriptures are confirmed by such miracles as the raising of the dead and the expulsion of demons. “I hate Erasmus from the bottom of my heart because he calls into question what ought to be our joy.” After breakfast one morning, Luther took a piece of chalk and wrote on the table: “Substance and words—Philipp [Melanchthon]. Words without substance—Erasmus. Substance without words—Luther. Neither substance nor words—Karlstadt.”

  (After leaving the Luther household, Karlstadt had tried to make a living as a farmer in Kemberg, a village not far from Wittenberg. Constantly harassed by Luther, though, he left Saxony in early 1529. After serving as a deacon for four years in Zurich, he settled in Basel, where he became a professor of the Old Testament and taught Hebrew until his death in December 1541.)

  Once, while Luther was responding to students’ questions, Katharina suddenly interjected, “Doctor, why don’t you stop talking and eat?” “I wish,” Luther snapped, “that women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening their mouths.” On another occasion, he said that his wife was an eloquent speaker but that “eloquence in women shouldn’t be praised; it’s more fitting for them to lisp and stammer,” whereas for men eloquence “is a great and divine gift.” Luther’s Table Talk is full of such patronizing remarks. “Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence,” he said. “Women have narrow shoulders and broad hips” and “a wide rump to sit on,” showing that they were created to stay at home and raise children. Punning on his wife’s name, Luther sometimes called her Kette, German for “chain.” At the cloister, Katharina was the subject of many jokes and endless gossip, and the students frequently treated her like a servant.

  She no doubt often felt like one. She had to rise at four every morning to get her work done. She drove the wagon, did the shopping, cultivated the fields, fed the animals, slaughtered the cattle, made butter and cheese, did the shopping, brewed the beer, and regularly hosted meals for up to forty people. Katharina was always modernizing and remodeling the cloister; at one point, she had installed a new bathroom made of sandstone. Katharina often complained about her husband’s lack of interest in earning money. Thanks to her savvy, however, the family prospered, and a 1542 inventory showed it in possession of five cows, nine calves, one goat with two kids, eight swine, two sows, and three piglets.

  “The lady of the pig market” is how Martin sometimes affectionately addressed her in letters. He also called her “my dearest” and signed off as “your loved one.” If prior to his marriage Luther had frankly acknowledged he did not love Katharina, over time he came to, saying that “I wouldn’t give up my Katy for France or for Venice.” (Katharina, however, usually addressed her husband as “Mr. Doctor.”) In the coming years, as Luther suffered from a series of ailments, including gout, constipation, hemorrhoids, the stone, dizziness, insomnia, and ringing in the ears, Katharina would be forever at his side, offering comfort and balm. She was a master of the Dreckapotheke, or excrement pharmacy, preparing concoctions of pig’s dung to calm the blood, horse manure in wine for coughs, and human excrement for bodily wounds.

  Though skeptical about such remedies, Luther appreciated his wife’s good sense and quiet tenderness—qualities that shaped his attitudes toward domestic life in general. It “is the pleasantest kind of life,” he observed, “to have a moderate household, to live with an obedient wife, and to be content with little.” “Imagine what it would be like without this sex. The home, cities, economic life, and government would virtually disappear. Men can’t do without women.” Admiring a portrait of his wife, Martin called marriage “the divine institution from which everything proceeds and without which the whole world would have remained empty.”

  During the Middle Ages, the iconic woman had always been the nun—virginal, silent, devout. Now Katharina was providing an alternative: the caring and competent clerical spouse. And the Luther household—busy, convivial, energetic—was giving rise to a new institution: the evangelical parsonage. Equipped more with books and ideals than money or property, it would come to occupy a prominent place in Protestant culture in both Europe and America. (The vicars and preachers in the novels of Trollope, Eliot, and Gaskell come
to mind.) The new clerical household, in turn, would elevate the status of family life. With the monastery fading, the family would gradually take its place as the main locus of piety in Protestant life.

  The influence of the evangelical household would be reinforced by an important instructional work that Luther prepared in 1529. The idea for it came from a series of visitations he made in 1528 to villages around Wittenberg. Like Melanchthon, he was shocked at local conditions. “The peasants learn nothing, know nothing, pray nothing, do nothing except abuse their liberty,” he wrote to Spalatin. “They go neither to confession nor to communion, as though they had been liberated from all the duties of religion.” Luther blamed “papistical bishops” who had failed to carry out their duties, but his comments offered further evidence of the lethargy and indifference that had pervaded the countryside after the peasant debacle.

  To combat such ignorance, Luther decided to produce a catechism—a summary of religious teachings for use in instruction. The Catholic Church had for centuries offered these summaries, and in the 1520s a flood of such instructional books issued from reformers; none, though, would have the impact of Luther’s catechism. Actually, he produced two catechisms—a large one, for preachers and advanced adults, and a small one, for children and beginners. The latter would become very popular. Barely more than a dozen pages long, it offered concise explanations of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the sacraments, the Lord’s Prayer, and other key prayers, framed in question-and-answer form. A central theme was obedience. Concerning civil government, the booklet stated, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authority. For whoever the governing authority is, it is ordained by God. But whoever resists the governing authority, resists God’s order.” Wives were to submit to their husbands, children were to obey their parents, and servants, day laborers, and workers were to be obedient to their earthly masters “with fear and trembling.” And everyone was to love his neighbor as himself.