A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  “The papacy,” he wrote, “is the devil’s church.” And: “The devil founded the papacy.” And: “The pope is Satanissimus.” And: “The papacy is Satan’s highest head and greatest power.” And: “The pope is the devil incarnate.” And: “The devil rules throughout the entire papacy.” And: “The devil is the false God [Abgott] of the pope.” And: “Because of God’s wrath the devil has bedunged us with big and gross arses in Rome.” Either Satan was the pope’s excrement or the papacy was Satan’s excrement, but it had to be one or the other. He wrote that unless “the Romanists” curbed their fury—as though his own tone were temperate—“there will be no remedy left except that” true Christians “girt about with force of arms … settle the matter no longer with words but by the sword. … If we strike thieves with the gallows, robbers with the sword, heretics with fire, why do we not much more attack in arms these masters of perdition, these cardinals, these popes, and all this sink of Roman Sodom which has without end corrupted the Church of God, and wash our hands in their blood?” (emphasis added).

  Pope Leo’s tolerance had seemed infinite, but this was too much. Protesting the abuse of indulgences had been heretical only in the eyes of precisians; Eck’s coup, after all, had been based on an antecedent in which the Church could scarcely take pride. Incitement of homicide, however, was beyond tolerance. To propose slaughtering the pontiff and his cardinals would have been a high crime had the offender been an ignorant member of the laity. Here he was an accomplished theologian, and disciplining his apostasy was overdue. Furthermore, that same June the vigilant Eck, now in hot pursuit of heresiarchs, arrived in Rome with a copy of a new, splenetic Luther sermon openly questioning the power of excommunication. Accompanying it were detailed reports of Lutheran converts spreading dissent in central Europe and Switzerland. Reconciled at last to the coming coronation of Charles as the new Holy Roman emperor, the pontiff finally acted. On June 15, 1520, announcing that the papacy was in mortal danger from “a wild boar which has invaded the Lord’s vineyard,” he issued Exsurge Domine, a bull condemning forty-one of Luther’s declarations, ordering the burning of his works, and appealing to him to recant and rejoin the faith. The German monk was given sixty days to appear in Rome and publicly renounce his heresies.

  Sixty days passed, he remained in Wittenberg, and the Curia accordingly issued a bull of excommunication. It was not signed by the pope, and at his insistence it stopped short of the ultimate Decet Romanum pontificem, eternally damning the monk. Nevertheless Luther was named and condemned. All Christians were forbidden to listen to him, to speak to him, or even to look at him. In any community contaminated by his presence, religious services were to be suspended. He was declared a fugitive from the Church; kings, princes, and nobles were commanded to banish him from their lands or deliver him to Rome.

  He responded with a series of caustic pamphlets. Then, told his books were being burned in Rome, he decided upon a dramatic act of defiance. At his suggestion, his faculty colleagues invited Wittenberg’s “pious and studious” undergraduates to gather outside the city’s Elster gate the next morning, December 10. A bonfire had been prepared. Cheering students emptied the university’s library shelves and ignited the pile. Finally Luther, with his own hands, cast a copy of the papal bull into the flames, murmuring: “Because you have corrupted God’s truth, may God destroy you in this fire.” The blaze continued until nightfall. The following day Luther assembled them again. This time he announced that any man who refused to renounce the authority of the Holy See would be denied salvation. “The monk,” Durant later wrote, “had excommunicated the pope.”

  BURNING A PAPAL BULL was, of course, a capital offense, but Luther had broken no law, because this bull was illegal. In the turmoil at the Vatican the Curia had been betrayed from within. The sixty day countdown had begun June 15, the day of the Exsurge Domine, and damned Luther on August 14. But under their own laws, this period of grace did not start to run until he had been handed the bull. And there the saboteurs had been particularly effective.

  He should have received it before the end of July. Summer had been dry; even a slow courier could have accomplished the journey from Rome to Wittenberg in less than seven weeks. Yet it did not reach him until Octorber 10. In itself the injustice was slight; Luther was burning bridges as well as decrees. The significance of the delay lies in the identity of the obstructionists. German archbishops, serving in Rome, had held up the bull for nearly four months. In so intervening, they were representing the will of their countrymen. Luther was to be saved, not by the justice of his cause, but because in his fatherland, as all over Europe, the political vacuum being left by the ebbing Holy Roman Empire was being filled by a new phenomenon: the rising nation-states.

  The tension between the peoples living on either side of the Alps was greater than the rivalry dividing Spain and Portugal. It was also much older. Piety and hostility toward the papacy had coexisted among central Europeans since the fifth century, when, they remembered with pride, Alaric had led their ancestors in sacking Rome. They also recalled—and this memory was bitter—how Pope Gregory VII had humiliated their leader six centuries later, forcing him to kneel in the snows of Canossa for three days before granting him absolution. Though Teutonic Obrigkeit, authority, remained in the hands of some three hundred independent princes, the Volk shared one language, one culture, and, increasingly, a sense of common identity. Their unanimity in the period may be overstated, but now that they were beginning to feel like Germans, Canossa and other old wounds were opened and nursed.

  After the Church’s jubilee of 1500, when Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI, was pope, German pilgrims recrossing the Brenner Pass had returned with wild stories of Vatican orgies, the poisoning of pontiffs, homicidal cardinals, pagan rites in the Curia, and nuns practicing prostitution in the streets of Rome. But the roots of Germany’s burgeoning anticlericalism lay deeper than gossip. To a people united by a flickering new national spirit, the imperiousness of the Vatican had become intolerable. Rome had decreed that no sovereign was legitimate until he had been confirmed by the pope. In theory, a pontiff could dismiss any emperor, king, or prince if displeased with him. He wasn’t even obliged to cite a reason. Clergymen, like later diplomats, were immune from civil law. No officer of the law could lay a hand on a priest guilty of rape or murder, and conflicts between civil and episcopal courts could be settled, by pontifical fiat, in favor of the clerics.

  Maximilian had nearly broken with the Vatican. In 1508 he had been barred from attending his own coronation in Rome by hostile Venetians. The schismatic Council of Pisa offered him the papacy. He declined then, but a year later he briefly considered separating the German church from Rome. In the end he was persuaded that he couldn’t rely on the support of German princes, but he went so far as to direct Jakob Wimpheling, the humanist, to draw up a list of Germany’s grievances against the papacy.

  Heading Wimpheling’s complaints were protests against the Vatican’s systematic looting of German taxpayers, industries, and the vaults of noblemen. Maximilian himself calculated that the papacy reaped a hundred times more in German revenues than he did himself—an exaggeration, of course; nevertheless, businessmen, the most vigorous men in the new German society, did find themselves competing with monastic industries whose profits, Rome had ruled, were exempt from taxation. Long before Luther arrived to lead his disgruntled countrymen, the chancellor to an archbishop of Mainz had angrily written an Italian cardinal that “taxes are collected harshly, and no delay is granted … and war tithes imposed without consulting the German prelates. Lawsuits that ought to have been dealt with at home have been hastily transferred to the apostolic tribunal. The Germans have been treated as if they were rich and stupid barbarians, and drained of their money by a thousand cunning devices. … For many years Germany has lain in the dust, bemoaning her poverty and her sad fate. But now her nobles have awakened as from sleep; now they have resolved to shake off the yoke, and to win back their ancient freedom.”
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  Among his countrymen, pastors and even prelates agreed. Archbishop Berthold von Henneberg wrote: “The Italians ought to reward the Germans for their services, and not drain the sacerdotal body with frequent extortions of gold.” He was ignored. Relationships between pious churchgoers and the ecclesiastical hierarchy worsened. When Karl von Miltitz had journeyed to Altenburg to meet Luther, he had been astounded to find that half Germany seemed critical of the Vatican. So strong was antipapal feeling in Saxony that Miltitz evaded questions from natives, denied holding the pontiff’s commission, and assumed a false identity.

  A Catholic historian notes that “a revolutionary spirit of hatred for the Church and the clergy had taken hold of the masses in various parts of Germany. … The cry ‘Death to the priests!’ which had long been whispered in secret, was now the watchword of the day.” Although the pope had remained ignorant of this festering discontent, the Curia knew of it. Rather than kindle an uprising there, the hierarchy had decided to exempt Germany from the Inquisition, and in 1516, the year before Luther posted his theses on the Castle Church door, one of the ablest men around the pontiff had warned him of imminent revolt in the heart of Europe.

  HIS NAME WAS GIROLAMO ALEANDRO, Latinized to Hieronymus Aleander. Then just forty, he was a handsome Venetian whose arched brows, penetrating eyes, and thoughtful, pursed mouth suggested a professorial life. In part this was justified. Aleandro was an ecclesiastic of commanding intellect. A humanist and future cardinal, he was a celebrated member of Europe’s intelligentsia—rector of the University of Paris, a colleague of Erasmus, fluent in all classical tongues, and honored lecturer at Venice and Orleans. He was also a man of action, however, and as such he would become Luther’s first formidable Catholic adversary. Aleandro had anticipated the coming mutiny during an official visit to Austria. There, he told Pope Leo, he had repeatedly overheard men muttering that they yearned for the emergence of a man brave enough to lead them against Rome.

  When the papacy issued a bull significant to one part of the Church’s vast realm, it was customary to dispatch eminent nuncios from Rome with bales of copies, which they would post in major population centers. Leo’s Exsurge Domine was such a document, and the dignitaries entrusted to inform all Germany of Luther’s shame were Aleandro and Johann Eck. To be chosen was regarded as an honor, and Eck, remembering his triumph over Luther in Leipzig the year before, set out with zest.

  Aleandro, remembering his premonition, was less enthusiastic. Earlier in the week word had reached the Vatican that their reception would be, at best, mixed; Luther had been degraded in Rome, but he was no pariah to the north. Among his supporters were Franz von Sickingen, imperial chamberlain and one of the Holy Roman Empire’s seven electors; Philipp Melanchthon, the theologian; Lazaras Spengler, poet, and Stadtrat (councillor) of Nuremberg; and Willibald Pirkheimer, the translator of Greek classics into Latin. Albrecht Dürer was praying for Luther. Karlstadt, rallying to his cause, had published De canonicis scripturis libellus, a slender volume commending the Bible and derogating pontiffs, the Epistles, traditions, and ecumenical councils. In Mainz even Archbishop Albrecht was flirting with the rebels.

  These were prominent, conservative Germans. Ulrich von Hutten was prominent, but no conservative; he was writing with the slashing, polemical pen of the new Lutherans. Calling for Germans to free themselves from Rome, he published an ancient German manuscript and noted pointedly: “While our forefathers”—the Goths and Huns—“thought it unworthy of them to submit to the Romans when Rome was the most martial nation in the world, we not only submit to these effeminate slaves of lust and luxury, but suffer ourselves to be plundered to minister to their sensuality.” Erasmus begged Hutten to mute his trumpet, but the poet laureate’s notes grew harder and harsher; that spring of 1520, demanding independence from Rome in Gespräche, a verse dialogue, he called the Vatican a “gigantic, bloodsucking worm,” adding: “The pope is a bandit chief, and his gang bears the name of the Church. … Rome is a sea of impurity, a mire of filth, a bottomless sink of iniquity. Should we not flock from all quarters to compass the destruction of this common curse of humanity?”

  Eck and Aleandro began to move warily. At Döbeln, Turgau, and Leipzig the papal posters, with the distinctive red-letter imprint on each seal, were torn down. Eck was stunned. How could this happen in Leipzig? Debating Luther in this Catholic stronghold only a year earlier, he had scored a great triumph. By all the rules as he knew them, he should have been entitled to deference. But the Wittenberg heresy defied precedents. Humbling Luther in the great tapestried hall of Pleissenburg Castle had actually been a blunder. In Erfurt many professors, and even clergymen, scorned Eck and Aleandro and their pontifical proclamation; then a mob of students arrived and tossed all the remaining copies in the river. Eck panicked and fled. *

  Aleandro was calmer—then. But less than six months later he too was appalled, writing the Curia from Hesse: “All Germany is up in arms against Rome. … Papal bulls of excommunication are laughed at. Numbers of people have ceased to receive the sacraments of penance. … Martin is pictured with a halo above his head. The people kiss these pictures. Such a quantity have been sold that I am unable to obtain one. … I cannot go out in the streets but the Germans put their hands to their swords and gnash their teeth at me. I hope the Pope will give me a plenary indulgence and look after my brothers and sisters if anything happens to me.”

  In Wittenberg Luther was content. On June 11, 1520—four days before the promulgation of Exsurge Domine in Rome—he had written Spalatin: “I have cast the die. I now despise the rage of the Romans as much as I do their favor. I will not reconcile myself to them for all eternity. … Let them condemn and burn all that belongs to me; in return I will do as much for them. … Now I no longer fear, and I am publishing a book in the German tongue about Christian reform, directed against the pope, in language as violent as if I were addressing Antichrist.”

  I AM PUBLISHING a book in the German tongue. … Although Martin Luther was a riddle of quirks and eccentricities, many wildly contradictory and some less than admirable, he was never a fool. At the outset he had been taken for one, but throughout 1520 events moved his way, partly because of the pope’s dawdling but also because Luther possessed intuitive political skills. He not only grasped the powerful Herrenvolk spirit rising throughout the fatherland; he had conceived an ingenious way to exploit it.

  As noted, the medieval elect, like imperial Rome, had kept the masses ignorant by a kind of linguistic elitism. Upper-class Romans had embraced Greek forms and grammatical laws, despite the fact that these clashed with the natural rhythms of the Latin language; as a consequence, serious texts had been unreadable to the vast majority of the empire’s inhabitants. Their successors had followed the same pattern, adopting Latin as the tongue of men in power.

  As new worlds of common speech struggled to be born, the humanists, with their veneration for antiquity, had actually played the role of obstructionists, fiercely criticizing Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio for writing in vernacular Tuscan, or Italian. The tide was beginning to run against them; sixteenth-century Italian intellectuals like Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Castiglione published in both Tuscan and Latin. In some parts of Europe—France, Castile, Portugal, and to a lesser degree England — public documents were appearing in vernacular.

  Elsewhere in Europe, however, those to whom Latin was gibberish—everyone, that is, except the higher clergy, the learned, and affluent noblemen—could not decipher a word of official pronouncements, laws, manifestos issued by their rulers; of the liturgies, hymns, and sacred rites of the Church; or, of course, of either Testament of the Bible. Contemporary books were equally unintelligible to them; so were political pamphlets. There were exceptions: the works of John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Langland in England, and, across the Channel, those of François Villon. Villon, however, was virtually unique. Other Frenchmen, believing that serious “literature” could not be written in a common language, overloaded their w
ork with Latinisms and were ridiculed as grands rhétoriquers.

  In Luther’s homeland Sebastian Brandt’s Das Narrenschiff was a lonely masterpiece; even so, Brandt was no humanist and his work no triumph of the Renaissance; it was instead the last embodiment of medieval thought. The Germans had developed a vernacular literature, but the books published by Gutenberg’s successors were light entertainment—folktales, epics of ancient kings, the fantasies of Brunhilde—old wine, of poor vintage, rebottled for a people who could not even fathom the sermons read by their parish priests, let alone the tremendous issues raised in Wittenberg three years earlier and now keeping the new Holy Roman emperor awake nights.

  Furthermore, and this was decisive for Luther, most Saxon, Austrian, Hessian, Pomeranian, Bavarian, Silesian, Brandenburg, and Westphalian nobles—the minor princes who would determine his fate during the coming winter—were equally handicapped. Only the wealthy could afford Latin teachers for their heirs. There were rich men in central Europe now, but they were in commerce; and trade, by tradition, was barred to the aristocracy. Von Hutten’s vitriolic leaflets were as meaningless to them as to their peasants. But like the peasantry, they could be reached through the tongue they had learned as children. Latin was precise, balanced, logical; a feast for scholars. But Luther knew he could be more effective, more eloquent, more moving —and would possess a far larger megaphone—if he addressed his people in simple German, einfach Deutsch.

  HIS FIRST APPEAL in German, Sermon von den guten Werken, was issued in June 1520, a few days after the pontiff’s Exsurge Domine bull was proclaimed in Rome. It was followed by three defiant tracts, beginning with An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation—in full, An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate—and ending with Von der Freiheit eines Christenmanschen (Of the Freedom of a Christian Man). In sum, they constituted an untempered (and often intemperate) assault on the Roman Catholic Church in all its guises, sacraments, theological interpretations, and conduct of Christian affairs on earth.