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THE DAYS WHEN the Church’s critics could be silenced by intimidating naive peasants, or by putting the torch to defiant apostates, were ending. There were too many of them; they were too resourceful, intelligent, well organized, and powerfully connected, and they were far more strongly entrenched than, say, the infidel host the crusaders had attacked. Their strongholds were Europe’s crowded, quarrelsome, thriving, and above all independent new universities.
Before the Renaissance, Christendom’s higher education had been in hopeless disarray. Some famous institutions had been established, though their forms and curricula would be almost unrecognizable to members of twentieth-century faculties.
The reawakening—the establishing of new ties with the gems of antiquity—was one of the great triumphs of the Renaissance. Its first seeds had been sown early in the fourteenth century, with the rediscovery of Latin classics; then the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 gave impetus to the revival of Greek learning.
talks, some merely anxious to escape the Ottoman peril. With them they brought genuine Hellenic manuscripts. For over a thousand years Italian professors fluent in Greek had assumed that the original texts of cultural masterpieces had perished. Discovering that they had survived, specialists and emissaries traveled through Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria to Constantinople, bearing gifts and gold and passionately searching for old manuscripts, statues, and coins, tokens of the glorious past. Thus began the transfer of priceless documents from East to West, where they joined the great Latin
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The French refined it to la Renaissance des lettres, and though its leaders embraced more than literature—they sought the re-emergence of all the lost learning of the old world, including the flowering of art, esthetics, mathematics, and the beginnings of modern science—the heaviest emphasis was on reverence for classical letters, the poetical and philosophical Hellenic heritage, scholarly purity, and the meticulous translation of the ancient manuscripts retrieved in Athens and Rome.
Their movement was still transitional; the change was one of emphasis, toward a new faith which held that man’s happiness and welfare in this lifetime should come first, taking precedence over what might or might not follow it, that mankind’s highest ethical objective is not the salvation of his soul but the earthly good of all humanity.
EVEN AFTER it had become obvious that medieval Christianity and the reawakened reason of the ancient world were on a collision course, the clash was not abrupt.
The shrewdest of them, aware that the papacy was spending fortunes on Vatican art even as famine stalked Europe, suspected the Vatican of exploiting them, tightening its grip on the masses by overawing them with beauty. One surprise rebel was Michelangelo, in his role as coarchitect for the new St. Peter’s. Pope Leo ordered exquisite Tuscan marble from the remote Pietrasanta range. The artist balked. Bringing it out, he said, would be too expensive.
To them this was tragic. The doctrine that the Church was perfect, that the very idea of change was heretical, deeply disturbed learned Catholics, leaving them torn between faith and reason.
But the solar system would not go away. It was too enormous. Within a century Galileo Galilei of Florence would confirm the Copernican system. Summoned to Rome, he, too, was found guilty of heresy. When he persisted in publishing his findings, he was called before the Inquisition, where, in 1633, under threat of torture, he disavowed his belief in a revolving earth.
But there had been little science and no modern civilization in the Dark Ages, when acceptance of papal supremacy by all Christendom had rescued a continent from chaos. Faith had literally held Europe together then, giving hope to men who had been without it. The most callous despots of the time, fearing God’s wrath, had yielded to papal commands, permitting the Church to intervene when princes had been devouring one another, forcing them to submit to the argument that temporal rulers must yield to the one authority whose sacraments promised eternal salvation.
Once more, however, he leveled his heaviest artillery on the Vatican. His contempt for Julius’s wars was venomous—“as if the Church had any enemies as pestilential as impious pontiffs who by their silence allow Christ to be forgotten, enchain [him] by their mercenary rules… and crucify him afresh by their scandalous life!” Depravity and corruption still outraged him: “As to these Supreme Pontiffs, who take the place of Christ,” he wrote, “were wisdom to descend upon them, it would inconvenience them!… It would lose them all that wealth and honor, all those possessions, triumphal progresses,
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The impact of his successes on Christendom’s establishment may be judged by an edict from the Holy Roman emperor. Any teacher found using the Colloquia in a classroom, he ordered, was to be executed on the spot. Martin Luther agreed. “On my deathbed I shall forbid my sons to read Erasmus’ ‘Colloquies.’” But Luther was then still professor of biblical exegesis at Wittenberg, an eminent member of the Catholic establishment. Within three years he would change his mind and, with it, the history of Western civilization. And Erasmus, though he denied it on his own deathbed, had sounded the claxon of
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The forces which fractured the unity of Christendom were enormously complex, and humanism, though a prime mover, was merely one current in the mighty wave which had just begun to form far out in the deep. One of its contributions was the revelation that art and learning had flourished before the birth of Jesus, when, it had been thought, such accomplishments were impossible. But men also wondered why God had allowed the triumph of the Muslims and the fall of Constantinople. And explorers returning from Asia and the Western Hemisphere reported thriving cultures which had either rejected Christ
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Another monk noted that “many convents… differ little from public brothels.” According to Durant, Guy Jouenneaux, a papal emissary sent to inspect the Benedictine monasteries of France in 1503, described the monks as foul-mouthed gamblers and lechers who “live the life of Bacchanals” and “are more worldly than the mere worldling.… Were I minded to relate all those things that have come under my own eyes, I should make too long a tale of it.”
The bishop of Torcello wrote: “The morals of the clergy are corrupt; they have become an offense to the laity.” The public perception of the priesthood was in fact appalling. Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador in England, wrote the emperor: “Nearly all the people hate the priests.” A Cambridge professor observed that “Englishmen, if called monk, priest, or clerk, felt bitterly insulted.
In Vienna the priesthood had once been the objective of ambitious youths. But now, on the eve of the religious revolt, it had attracted no recruits for twenty years.
In Norfolk, Ripton, and Lambeth, 23 percent of the men indicted for sex crimes against women were clerics, though they constituted less than 2 percent of the population.
Egidio of Viterbo, general of the Augustinians, summed up Pope Alexander’s Rome in nine words: “No law, no divinity; Gold, force and Venus rule.” Guicciardini wrote: “Reverence for the Papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men.” In 1513 Machiavelli charged that there could be no greater proof of papal “decadence than the fact that the nearer people are to the Roman Church, the head of their religion, the less religious they are.
Discontent was growing when the wasteful Pope Leo found himself broke—undone by his war against the Duchy of Urbino. Going to the well once too often, on March 15, 1517, the Holy Father announced a “special” sale of indulgences. The purpose of this “jubilee” bargain (feste dies), as he called it, was to rebuild St. Peter’s basilica. As an incentive donors would receive, not only “complete absolution and remission of all sins,” but also “preferential treatment for their future sins.”
Setting up in the nave of the local church, Tetzel would begin his pitch by opening the bag and calling out, “I have here the passports… to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of Paradise.” The fees were dirt-cheap, he pointed out, if they considered the alternatives. Christians who had committed a mortal sin owed God seven years’ penance. “Who then,” he asked, “would hesitate for a quarter-florin to secure one of these letters of remission?” Anything could be forgiven, he assured them, anything.
In 1505, at the age of twenty-two, he was lecturing on the ethics of Aristotle, using the original Greek text. Two years later he was consecrated a priest, and the year after that, though he continued to regard himself as a friar or monk, he was appointed by Frederick to the chair of professor of philosophy at Wittenberg, on the Elbe, about sixty miles southwest of Berlin. Later in his career he translated both the Old and New Testaments into New High German, a language he virtually created, and composed forty-one hymns, for which he wrote both the words and music.
Luther adopted satanic tactics. He invited the devil to “kiss” or “lick” his Steiss, threatened to “throw him into my anus, where he belongs,” to defecate “in his face” or, better yet, “in his pants” and then “hang them around his neck.”
Yet Luther’s reply to the jubilee agent was not as dramatic as legend had made it. He did not “nail” a denunciation of the pope on the door of Frederick’s Castle Church. In Wittenberg, as in many university towns of the time, the church door was customarily used as a bulletin board; an academician with a new religious theory would post it there, thus signifying his readiness to defend it against all challengers.
Yet if news was electrifying, it could pass from village to village and even across the Channel, borne word-of-mouth. That is what happened after Luther affixed his theses to the church door. Before the first week in November had ended, spontaneous demonstrations supporting or condemning him had erupted throughout Germany.
The peasants’ view of the pope is harder to define. They revered him, but not as the Vicar of Christ. He was more like a great magician. Now his powers had been impeached by a lowly Augustinian theologian. They expected a vengeful response. Its potency would sway their allegiance. If the pontiff’s magic failed, they would begin to turn away from him.
Moreover, as fragmentary accounts of the Gospels began to circulate, the peasantry learned that the sympathies of Christ and his apostles had lain with the oppressed, not with the princes who had presumed to speak in his name.
Leo was stunned. Abandon indulgences? Just as his pontificate was approaching bankruptcy? He was rebuilding a cathedral, waging wars, funding elaborate dinner parties while trying to keep Raphael, Lotto, Vecchio, Perugino, Titian, Parmigianino, and Michelangelo in wine. The Curia, juggling budgets, was swamped with bills. And now a German monk—a mere friar—had the audacity to condemn a prime source of Vatican revenue. The Holy Father summoned Martin Luther to Rome. The invitation was declined. Acceptance might mean the stake—there were plenty of precedents for that.
Frederick, after collecting a papal levy from his people, had decided to keep it and build the University of Wittenberg.
Historians agree that Luther could have been swiftly crushed had the pope moved decisively in his role as Vicar of Christ, the spiritual head of Christendom. Instead he dallied, vacillated, became engrossed in minor matters, and spent too many late evenings with his books. Leo X was no Borgia. In many ways he was more admirable than Martin Luther. Head of the Medici family, a poet and a man of honor, he was a leading patron of the Renaissance, a connoisseur of art, a scholar steeped in classical literature, and a pontiff tolerant enough to chuckle as he read the satires of Erasmus,
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Oblivious to it, Leo waited nearly three years after the posting of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses before issuing an ultimatum to their author. Meantime the situation within Germany had changed radically.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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,
Heading Wimpheling’s complaints were protests against the Vatican’s systematic looting of German taxpayers, industries, and the vaults of noblemen.
The Germans have been treated as if they were rich and stupid barbarians, and drained of their money by a thousand cunning devices.…
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.
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
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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.
Actually no one was thicker in it. Luther’s movement was sweeping northern Europe: first
Italy and Spain never threatened to defect. Nor, after England turned, did Ireland; whatever the English were for, the Irish were against.
Early Protestant strength sprang from tradesmen; from anticlericals; from the educated middle classes, whose humanistic studies had convinced them that Catholicism was rooted in superstition; and, in Germany, from the nobility, whose first acts, upon renouncing allegiance to Rome, were to appropriate all Church wealth within their domains, including land and monasteries. This was a powerful incentive to break with Rome; overnight a prince’s tax revenues increased enormously,
All converts agreed on certain principles: renunciation of papal rule; replacing Latin with common tongues; the abandonment of celibacy, pilgrimages, adoration of the Virgin and the saints; and, of course, condemnation of the old clergy. However, because the religious revolution also aroused advocates of panaceas, divisions appeared quickly, and ran deep. Presently Protestants were at each other’s throats.
Thus Protestantism was divided at its birth. There was the Lutheran Church, and there was the Reformed. As other major figures emerged—Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland, for example; John Calvin, a native of France; and the Scotsman John Knox—new sects formed, each with its own views of worship, each as intolerant of the others as it was of Rome, each as repressive as Catholicism. Anabaptists appeared, and Mennonites, Bohemians, and the forerunners of Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians.
NO ONE HAS calculated how many sixteenth-century Christians slaughtered other Christians in the name of Christ, but the gore began to thicken early. Within a year of Worms, Von Sickingen was in the field, fighting an army led by the archbishop of Trier—the prelate turned out to be the better general; the knight fell mortally wounded—and within four years the number of Germans killed or executed approached a quarter-million.
Catholics could find refuge in monasteries, with sympathetic sovereigns or princes, in the papal states, or among the thousandfold sanctuaries of the Holy Roman emperor. The intellectuals were usually without champions, unarmed in a Europe bristling with weapons, and at times it seemed that every man’s hand was against them. Very few were to be untouched during the disorders. Some, like Erasmus, fled from one asylum to another; some were executed; others survived torture but were horribly maimed, their noses torn away, foreheads branded, hands cut off at the wrist, or nipples plucked out by
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A former professor of the University of Louvain, Adrian was exactly what Catholicism desperately needed: a reformer. In his first speech to the cardinals he bluntly told them that corruption in the Church was so rife that “those steeped in sin” could “no longer perceive the stench of their own iniquities.” Under his predecessor, he said, “sacred things have been misused, the commandments have been transgressed and in everything there has been a turn for the worse.” They eyed him stonily. He moved decisively to end the sale of indulgences, outlaw simony, cut the papal budget, and assure that
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