Each vehemently assaulted the papacy (“Hearest thou this, O pope, not most holy of men but most sinful? Oh, that God from heaven would soon destroy thy throne, and sink it in the abyss of hell!”), and all constituted naked appeals to German patriotism. Rome’s greatest crime, if we are to judge it by these indictments, was neither scriptural nor theological; it was the exploitation of Germans, and particularly their economy, by Italian imperialists. Each year, Luther estimated, over 300,000 gulden found their way from Germany to Rome. He wrote: “We here come to the heart of the matter.”
Earlier, when he had posted his theses on the Castle Church bulletin board, readers left with the impression that indulgences had been the heart of the matter. Since then he had attacked four of the seven sacraments, defending baptism, communion, and, usually, contrition, but rejecting the others along with the doctrine of transubstantiation. Now his grievances were more comprehensible to Fuggers than theologians. “How comes it that we Germans must put up with such robbery and such extortion of our property at the hands of the pope? … If we justly hang thieves and behead robbers, why should we let Roman avarice go free? For he is the greatest thief and robber that has come or can come into the world, and all in the holy name of Christ and St. Peter! Who can longer endure it or keep silence?”
Not Martin Luther. He wanted papal legatees to be expelled from the land, German clergymen to renounce their loyalty to the Vatican, and a national church established, with the archbishop of Mainz as its leader. His thoughts were now ranging far beyond the pale, into territory never before explored by theologians, or at least theologians outside Rome. On October 6, 1520, while Aleandro and Eck were making their unpleasant tour of Germany, posting bulls damning him and watching them be torn down, he published a manifesto in Latin and German charging that the Church founded by Jesus Christ had suffered a thousand years of imprisonment under the papacy, shackled and corrupted in morals and faith. He denied that marriage was a sacrament and said any wife married to an impotent man should sleep around until she conceived a child, which she could pass off as her husband’s. If he objected, she could divorce him, though Luther thought bigamy more sensible than divorce. At the end he repeated his defiance: “I hear a rumor of new bulls and papal maledictions sent out against me, in which I am urged to recant. … If that is true, I desire this book to be part of that recantation.”
After reading this, Von Miltitz, astonishingly, still believed in the possibility of a reconciliation between the apostate monk in Wittenberg and the pontiff in Rome. On October 11, 1520, the young Saxon priest, now a spokesman for the pope, appeared in Wittenberg with a proposition: he would try to have the bull withdrawn if Luther would write the pope, denying malice in his assaults and presenting a reasonable case for reforms. Luther agreed, and in his letter he did, in fact, ask Leo to take none of his polemics personally (“Thy blameless life [is] too well known and too high to be assailed”). This, however, followed:
But thy See, which is called the Roman Curia, and of which neither thou nor any man can deny that it is more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was, and which is, as far as I can see, characterized by a totally depraved, hopeless, and notorious wickedness—that See I have truly despised. … The Roman Church has become the most licentious den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the kingdom of sin, death, and hell. … They err who ascribe to thee the right of interpreting Scripture, for under cover of thy name they seek to set up their own wickedness in the Church, and, alas, through them Satan has already made much headway under thy predecessors. In short, believe none who exalt thee, believe those who humble thee.
Luther was now beyond redemption. This was the language of a fanatic, and deep in the bowels of the Curia papal clerks and chamberlains began, in their timeless way, to prepare his Decet Romanum pontificem—his absolute excommunication. Whether saboteurs were still entrenched there is unknown, but the bull was not ready for the pontiff’s signature until late January 1521, and four months later, when Luther and the Holy Church finally parted, no copies of it had reached Germany.
In reality it would be only a technicality; the first bull had branded him an outlaw, banishing him from Christendom, and by both law and custom he should have been a runaway, the quarry of every European ruler. The fact that all were looking the other way—or that Rome wasn’t prodding them—was no excuse in Aleandro’s eyes. Seething over the injustice of it, he decided to corner the chief scofflaw, Frederick III the Wise, elector of Saxony. He found him in Cologne on October 23, 1520. The elector was in a foul mood. He had expected to be in Aachen, where Charles V, only twenty years old, was receiving the sacraments as Holy Roman emperor—the last of the line, as it would develop, with any genuine hope of achieving the medieval dream: a unified empire embracing all Christendom. Frederick shared the dream, had voted for Charles (without being bribed), and had been looking forward to the coronation all year. But he was nearly sixty, a great age then, and had always been an enthusiastic gourmand. Now he was paying the price. Immobilized by gout, he lay sprawled in an inn on the outskirts of the University of Cologne, attended by a professor of medicine, glaring at his swollen foot and groaning.
He received Aleandro ceremoniously; his respect for papal nuncios was great, and after ruling Saxony for thirty-four years he had learned to rally when called upon for decision. But he was not called the Wise for nothing. He knew how to distribute responsibility. After Aleandro had pleaded with him to arrest Luther, the elector said he wanted advice, which, fortunately, was available; Erasmus was lecturing nearby. Frederick sent for him, knowing the great humanist then shared his view of Luther and could express it more eloquently.
Erasmus did. An arrest of Luther was unjustified, he told Aleandro, because everyone knew that monstrous misconduct had shredded the Church’s reputation, and attempts to mend the holy garment should be encouraged, not punished. The elector asked him what he considered Luther’s major blunders. Wryly, Erasmus replied that he had made two: “He attacked the popes in their crowns and the monks in their bellies.” As to Exsurge Domine, he doubted the bull was genuine. The pope was a gentle man; it did not sound at all like him. According to Pastor, the Catholic historian, Erasmus said he suspected a conspiracy in the Curia. Frederick then gave Aleandro his decision. Luther, he said, had appealed the bull; meantime he should remain free.
He added—and this exasperated the nuncio—that if it came to a trial, the court would sit in Germany, not Rome. Hurrying to Aachen, Aleandro appealed this matter to the new emperor, Charles, who, to his consternation, confirmed Frederick. Charles didn’t like it. The powers of his new office were overshadowed by his role as king of Spain, where the situation was unlike that in Germany, and the Church’s challengers were few and weak. Spanish prelates would never put up with a sovereign tolerant of heresiarchs. Furthermore, war between Spain and France was imminent, and he was trying to negotiate an alliance with the Vatican, an arrangement which would include papal funds for his armies. Finally, as a condition of his election in Frankfurt am Main, he had agreed that no German could be convicted without a fair hearing in his own country. The emperor therefore had no choice. Luther, he said, would have to be tried before an imperial diet, which would convene in Worms on January 27, 1521.
SITTING ON THE LEFT BANK of the Rhine, some ten miles northwest of Mannheim, the ancient city of Worms (pronounced Vurmz) was rich in Roman, ecclesiastical, and folk history; its destruction by the Huns had been immortalized in The Nibelungenlied, and only twenty-six years earlier Maximilian had presided over the most recent diet to be held there, proclaiming, as its ultimate achievement, “perpetual public peace” (ewiger Landfriede).
Now the irony of those words lay heavy over the eminent assemblage gathering in response to the imperial decree—the empire’s archbishops, bishops, princes, counts, dukes, margraves, and representatives of free cities, one of which Worms itself had been for nearly four centuries. Their mood now was anything but peaceful. To the dismay of the t
wenty-year-old emperor, they were obsessed with one topic: the fate of Martin Luther. Charles intended to try the heretical professor here (and meant to see him convicted), but that had not been his purpose in convening the Reichstag. He wanted to mobilize the people for the coming conflict with France and to strengthen the empire’s administration, moral discipline, and ties with the Vatican, whose support he needed to shield Hungary from the infidel Turks.
The prospects for papal appropriations were dimmed even before the first session opened. To the emperor’s horror—and the rage of Aleandro—“the great body of the German nobles,” writes a Catholic historian, “applauded and seconded Luther’s attempts.” Aleandro himself reported that the air was thick with leaflets denouncing Rome. One, written in Von Sickingen’s castle at Ebernburg, a few miles from Worms, was from the irascible Ulrich von Hutten. Hutten demanded that the nuncio and his Roman entourage leave German soil: “Begone, ye unclean swine! Depart from the sanctuary, ye infamous traffickers! Touch not the altars with your desecrated hands! … How dare you spend the money intended for pious uses in luxury, dissipation, and pomp, while honest men are suffering hunger? The cup is full. See ye not that the breath of liberty is stirring?”
Alarmed, the new emperor’s confessor—Jean Glapion, a Franciscan—met privately with Frederick’s chaplain, Spalatin. Glapion believed a confrontation with Luther under these circumstances would be disastrous for the Church. The only solution lay in compromise. In his opinion, he confided, many Lutheran calls for ecclesiastical reform were justified; indeed, he had warned Charles V that he would face divine punishment if Catholicism was not purged from such “overweening abuses.” In five years, he promised, imperial power would be used to sweep them away. But Luther had not been blameless—his Babylonian Captivity had made Glapion feel “scourged and pummeled from head to foot.” Some sort of recantation would be necessary. Spalatin sent the Franciscan’s proposition to Wittenberg by horseman; in three weeks the rider returned with a blunt rejection.
In any event, neither the Franciscan nor his august penitent could speak for the pontiff, and Aleandro, who could, was in no mood to bargain. On March 3, appearing before the diet, the nuncio demanded the immediate condemnation of Luther. He was turned down, however, on the ground that “the Wittenberg monk,” as the accused was now known throughout Germany, was entitled to a hearing. Accordingly, another swift horseman was dispatched to Saxony, this one bearing an imperial invitation to testify. Charles added: “You need fear no violence nor molestation, for you have our safe-conduct.”
This assurance was received skeptically in Wittenberg. Just such a pledge, it was remembered, had been Hus’s undoing. And in fact the emperor’s old tutor Adrian of Utrecht, now a cardinal, was urging an encore—he wanted Charles to break his word, arrest Luther as he approached the diet, and send him to Rome. The emperor refused, but Spalatin, informed of the ruse by spies, rushed a warning to Saxony. Luther ignored it: “Though there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I will go there.” On April 2 he left home—a crowd including forty professors cheered him off—and two weeks later a band of German knights clattering alongside in full armor, brandishing sharpened swords, escorted him to the diet. People lining the streets cheered the spectacle. Aleandro was deeply offended. Yet in light of Adrian’s abortive plot, the precaution does not seem to have been excessive.
The diet setting was spectacular: the monk, appearing in his simple plain robe, faced his inquisitor, Johann von der Ecken, a functionary of the archbishop of Trier, and behind him, the court. This body comprised, first, a panoply of prelates in embroidered, flowered vestments and, second, secular rulers and their ambassadors in the most elaborate finery of the time —short furred jackets bulging at the sleeves, silk shirts with padded shoulders, velvet doublets, brightly colored breeches, and beribboned, bejeweled braquettes, or codpieces. (They were of course padded. It would have been ignoble for a nobleman not to appear to be what the Germans called grosstiftung: grossly well endowed.) Titled laymen wore coronets, tiaras, diadems; young Charles, presiding on a throne as supreme civil judge, wore his imperial crown; prelates wore miters, and burghers furred and feathered hats.
Luther’s head was uncovered and tonsured. Nevertheless he was the commanding figure there, and everyone seemed to realize it. But when Ecken gestured sweepingly toward a table piled with the monk’s published works and ordered him to retract the heresies in them, Luther, for the first time in his public life, hesitated. Nodding slowly, he acknowledged the tracts. As to the retraction … he faltered and asked for time. The emperor granted him a day. That night several members of the diet surreptitiously visited his simple lodging, and Hutten sent a note from Von Sickingen’s nearby castle. All begged him to hold his ground.
And in the morning he did. When Ecken again demanded repudiation, Luther replied that those passages describing clerical abuses were just. At that point the multilingual Charles cried: “Immo!”—“No!” Luther personally reproached him: “Should I recant at this point, I would open the door to more tyranny and impiety, and it would be all the worse if it appeared that I had done so at the insistence of the Holy Roman Empire.” Pausing and setting himself, he agreed to withdraw anything contrary to Scripture.
Ecken, ready for this, replied: “Martin, your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics.” In reality, he added, the right to scriptural interpretations was reserved to ecumenical councils and the Holy See: “You have no right to call into question the most holy orthodox faith” which had been “defined by the Church … and which we are forbidden by the Pope and the Emperor to discuss, lest there be no end to debate.” Once more he asked: “Do you or do you not repudiate your books and the errors which they contain?”
Until now all exchanges had been in Latin. This time, however, Luther replied in German. He rejected the authority of popes and councils, which had contradicted one another so often. He recanted nothing. To do so would violate his conscience; it would not, he added cryptically, even be safe. He ended: “Hier stehe Ich, Ich kann nicht anders.” (“Here I stand. I can do no other.”) Then, turning, he departed alone.
It was, Thomas Carlyle would write, “the greatest moment in the modern history of man.” Certainly it was the most astonishing moment in young Charles’s life. To rebuke a Holy Roman emperor! To defy the glittering array of ecclesiastical authority! The next day he summoned his most powerful princes and read aloud a statement he had written in French, expressing regret that he had not acted against the heretical monk’s “false teaching” with greater alacrity. He told them that although Luther could return home under his sauf-conduit, he would be forbidden to preach or make any disturbance along the way. “I will proceed against him as a notorious heretic,” he said and added, gratuitously, he thought, “I assume you will do the same.”
To his further amazement, only four of his electors agreed; among those declining were Frederick the Wise and Ludwig of the Palatinate. That night placards bearing the image of a peasant’s shoe—the German symbol of revolution—appeared all over Worms, including the door of the Rathaus (town hall). Bishops, frightened for their safety, implored Luther to make peace with the diet, but he refused, and, after a week left on his trip home. Pope Leo had sent his personal guarantee of the imperial safe-conduct, but it would expire on the tenth day of Luther’s journey, and Frederick, taking no chances, disguised a troop of his soldiers as highwaymen and staged a false ambush on May 6. Luther was spirited away to Wartburg Castle, near Eisenach, in the Thuringian Forest, and hidden from the world under the alias Junker Georg.
In Worms his princely allies had already begun to slip away. On the day of his disappearance only a rump diet remained in session. Nevertheless Charles convened it to deliver a vitriolic denunciation of the rebel monk, drafted by the frustrated Aleandro. The diatribe charged, among other things, that Luther had “sullied marriage, disparaged confession, and denied the body and blood of Our Lord.” It continued:
“He is a pagan in his denial of free will. The devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle and invented new ones. … His teaching makes for rebellion, division, war, murder, robbery, arson, and the collapse of Christendom. He lives the life of a beast.”
On the emperor’s instructions, pursuit of the monk and his accomplices was to begin immediately. His writings were to be “eradicated from the memory of man.” Aleandro ordered Luther’s books burned. Those members of the diet still in the city ratified the imperial decision, and three weeks later it was formally promulgated. Meantime Pope Leo, who had been closely following the preparations for war in France and Spain, switched his allegiance from Francis to Charles, encouraging a preemptive strike by Spain. That was all the emperor salvaged from the Diet of Worms.
Had Charles remained in Germany to enforce his edict, he would have been unchallenged. His spies could have quickly found their man in Wartburg. After all, several bands of Lutheran admirers did. But lawmen would have been unnecessary anyway. Luther’s temperament wouldn’t permit him to hole up indefinitely, bored in the woods. Within a few months he left his lair to deliver a series of eight sermons in Wittenberg. Yet the emperor was already gone. Preoccupied by his conflict with the French, he absented himself from central Europe for ten years. By the time he returned, it was too late. Europe had changed. Somewhere in the continent a kind of universal joint—one of those suspicious devices whose design could be found among Leonardo’s papers—had shifted. German princes, the king of France—even the pope—were loath to give Charles the powers he needed to suppress Luther. Moreover, the monk and the movement he had launched had grown too powerful to be suppressed. The emperor tried mightily, but it would be his dying effort, and medieval Christendom would die with him.
A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age Page 19
