A World Lit Only by Fire (28 page)

Pope Leo X (1475–1521)

Maximilian’s advice, which Frederick sought, was decisive. The Habsburg emperor had only five months to live, but he had lost
none of the political shrewdness which had forged an intricate dynastic structure, making his family dominant in central Europe.
He was keeping a close watch on the interplay of German politics and religion. “Take good care of that monk,” Maximilian wrote
the elector. Handing Luther over to the pontiff, he explained, could be a political blunder. In his judgment, anticlerical
sentiment was increasing throughout Germany.

Almost immediately an imperial diet, or Reichstag, confirmed him. The emperor, in summoning his German princes to Augsburg,
was responding to a request from Rome. Leo had told him he was planning a new crusade against the Turks and wanted a surtax
to support it. The diet rejected his appeal. The action was highly unusual, but not unprecedented; Frederick, after collecting
a papal levy from his people, had decided to keep it and build the University of Wittenberg. His peers had been heartened.
All the Vatican wanted from the princes, it seemed, was money, money, and more money. In their view the confirmation fees,
annates, and costs of canonical litigation were already millstones around the empire’s neck. Besides, they had sent the Curia
revenues for other crusades, only to learn that the ventures had been canceled, while the funds, unreturned, had been spent
on Italian projects. All previous crusades had failed anyway. And the princes weren’t worried about Turks. The real enemy
of Christendom, they decided, was what one of them called “the hell-hound in Rome.” In a conciliatory letter to the Vatican,
Maximilian assured the pope that he would move sternly against heresy. At the same time, he ventured to suggest that Luther
be treated carefully.

A
FTER MUCH THOUGHT
, Leo agreed. Luther’s summons to Rome was canceled. Instead, in the autumn of 1518 the pontiff ordered him to confer with
a papal emissary—Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, general of the Dominicans—in Augsburg. On October 7 Luther arrived
there with an imperial safe-conduct in his pocket. By now his life was in jeopardy, though Cajetan was no threat. The cardinal
was a man of honor; he possessed a formidable intellectual reputation and had published a tremendous nine-volume commentary
on Aquinas’s
Summa theologica
. Their meeting, however, was barren of results, and since neither principal had been told its purpose, it ended in fiasco.
Luther had come prepared to discuss an agenda of reforms, but the cardinal was an enforcer of ecclesiastical discipline. Considering
his scholarly background, it seems odd that he ignored Luther’s professorial appointment. Instead he acted in his role as
a Dominican general, viewing the Wittenberg monk merely as a member of the lower clergy, who, having pledged obedience to
prelates, could not criticize them publicly. The only issue, Cajetan said, was the sentence to be meted out.

He had, in fact, already reached his decision: the offender must immediately issue a public retraction and solemnly swear
never again to question papal policy. Luther bluntly refused. His eminence, incensed, dismissed the impenitent priest and
ordered him never to reappear in his presence unless he was on his knees, delivering an unconditional recantation. Then, alone,
Cajetan scrawled a vehement denunciation of Luther and sent it at once, by special messenger, to Frederick the Wise.

Servants, watching this, reported it to Saxon councillors—in that age spies were ubiquitous; every European monarch maintained
espionage rings in every other royal court, and the largest and most skillful were embedded deep in the Vatican. Rumors to
the contrary, Cajetan did not actually try to arrest Luther, but concern for the monk’s safety was genuine. After a reliable
source reported plans to take him to Italy in chains, he was bundled out a side door, concealed in a farmer’s cart, and hurried
out of the city. It had been close; the trap had been about to spring. Cajetan wrote Frederick again, demanding that Luther
be sent to Italy at once under armed guard. The elector refused. The monk was safe for the moment, but his situation was that
of a fugitive living in a country which has decided, at least for the moment, not to extradite him.

Safely back in Wittenberg, he wrote a lively account of his confrontation with the cardinal and circulated it throughout Germany.
To one friend he wrote: “I send you my trifling work that you may see whether or not I am right in supposing that, according
to Paul, the real Antichrist holds sway over the Roman court.” Luther and his Lutherans were growing more intemperate in their
language, and their private references to the pope were growing more irreverent. The pontiff again invited him to Rome for
confession, offering to pay for the trip; Luther again decided that his security would be tighter in Wittenberg. The monk’s
peril had grown. The Holy Father and his prelates were omnipotent in the judgement of heresy. Every European sovereign was
bound by law to deliver into their hands anyone branded an apostate by the ecclesiastic hierarchy. Lately the pope had become
wary of exercising that right. As the prestige of the Holy Roman Empire weakened, it had become obvious that eventually a
scofflaw ruler would defy him. But the line was only beginning to blur. No monarch had yet refused to hand over a heresiarch
—and thousands of men had perished at the stake for offenses less flagrant than those already committed by Wittenberg’s seditious
professor. To challenge papal supremacy was, by definition, heretical and a capital offense. In the memory of living men four
Germans had been martyred for apostasy, and the similarity of their offenses and Luther’s was striking. Johan von Wesel of
Erfurt, like Luther a professor, had rejected indulgences, telling his students: “I despise the pope, the Church, and the
councils, and I worship only Christ.” Despite a later recantation, he had been sent to his death. Condemnation had also awaited
the brothers John and Lewin of Augsburg, for pronouncing indulgences a hoax, and Wessel Gansfort, who had rejected indulgences,
absolution, and purgatory, calling the Bible the sole source of faith and salvation.

Luther later said of Gansfort, “If I had read his works before, my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything
from [him], so great is the agreement between our spirits.” That was also true of the others, and if they had been guilty
of high crimes, so was he; he had defied the Vatican in print, on platforms, and from the pulpit. All that was lacking was
a formal confession before an official ecclesiastical body, and on June 27, 1519, eight months after his flight from Augsburg,
he unwittingly provided that in the great tapestried hall of Leipzig’s Pleissenburg Castle.

Actually he could, with dignity, have absented himself from the Leipzig debate. The principal figure, in effect representing
Luther, was his senior colleague at Wittenberg, Andreas Bodenstein, universally known, from his birthplace, as Professor Karlstadt.
Karlstadt had run afoul of the Catholic hierarchy when
Obelisks
, Johann Eck’s polemical reply to Luther’s theses, had appeared. At the time Luther himself had been packing for the Augustinian
meeting in Heidelberg; his own comments had been confined to a few scribbled notes at the bottoms of pages. But Karlstadt,
eager to join the struggle, had produced a manuscript listing 379 new theses, to which he had added another 26 before publication.
And now, challenged by Eck, he found himself in the middle of the battle.

E
VERY SEAT
was taken. Most of the audience comprised theologians and nobles, but there was a large delegation of Wittenberg students
armed with clubs, prepared to fight for their professors. The youths kept a wary eye on the presiding officer, Duke George
of Albertine Saxony. Duke George was a cousin of Frederick the Wise, but, unlike the elector, he was also a fierce conservative
and therefore hostile to Luther. The only motive for Luther’s presence in the hall was personal loyalty. He was a fighter
and an able debater, and Karlstadt, though intellectually gifted, was neither. The great Eck was expected to destroy him.
Luther knew Eck could do it, but meant to see to it that he left the hall bearing a few bruises of his own.

As it turned out, Eck carried the day, scoring a greater victory than anyone had anticipated. Afterward he boasted of a personal
triumph. He was right; it was. When Luther intervened, supporting his colleague, Eck skillfully maneuvered him far afield,
then to a quagmire, into which he sank. The catastrophe began innocently, with a dispute over obscure issues raised a century
earlier at the ecumenical General Council of Constance, called to reform the Church, bring an end to the Great Schism (there
were three rival popes at the time), and suppress heresy. Unaware of where they were headed, Luther allowed Eck to lead him
into a candid discussion of a tragic victim of the council, the Bohemian martyr Jan Hus.

Hus, the first great Czech patriot, had wanted to see the establishment of a Bohemian national church. After his ordination
he had dominated the ancient University of Prague as its rector and dean of the philosophy faculty. Delivering both lectures
and sermons in Czech, he rode to a crest on the rising sense of Bohemian national identity. By attempting to end abuses of
the clergy, he offended his ecclesiastical superiors. Excommunicated, he nevertheless continued preaching under the protection
of Bohemia’s weak King Wenceslas IV (Václav in Czech).

He then alienated powerful men in the Church and grievously offended the king. In 1411, the antipope John XXIII had demanded
a large Czech sale of indulgences to finance new wars. Wars, Hus argued, were temporal; using ecclesiastical power to finance
them was intolerable. Wenceslas, who had been promised a share in the proceeds of the sale, turned against him. Hus went into
hiding and wrote tracts supporting his position, shielded by admiring peasants. Then, in 1414, when the Council of Constance
was meeting, he was invited to address it. The reigning Holy Roman emperor, Sigismund, offered him a safe-conduct, and he
accepted it, a suicidal error, for Sigismund betrayed him into the hands of the schismatic pope. Sentenced by a panel of judges,
all his enemies, Hus went to the stake as a heretic.

Had Luther approved the condemnation of Hus, or even evaded the issue, his movement would have collapsed and he would have
been scorned, even by his students, as craven and dishonorable. Being neither, he replied that even ecumenical councils could
err. Hus had been right, he said; his doctrines had been sound; those who had broken faith with him, and then damned him,
had behaved shamefully and disgraced the Church.

It was a brave reply. It was also calamitous. His differences with Rome had begun with a minor dispute over indulgences. Now
he had challenged pontifical authority over Christendom, revealing himself before all Europe as an unshriven, unrepentant
apostate. He knew it, and as he left Pleissenburg Castle, surrounded by his vigilant students, he was a badly shaken man.

O
N THE DAY FOLLOWING
Luther’s humiliation, the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire met in Frankfurt am Main to choose a new emperor, Maximilian
having died six months earlier. The identity of the successor to
der gross Max
was far more engrossing to Pope Leo than the incipient split in the Catholic Church—a demonstration of how hopelessly the
pontiff’s priorities were askew. 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,
appreciative that the humanist had observed the gentlemanly rule under which learned men of that time were free to write as
they pleased, provided they confined themselves to Latin, leaving the unlettered masses undisturbed.