A World Lit Only by Fire (29 page)

Those closest to the pope agreed that he was afflicted by three weaknesses: he was superficial, a spendthrift, and he lacked
judgment. His poor judgment was to be his undoing, and it contributed heavily to the undoing of his Church. In the absence
of decisive pontifical action, the Wittenberg abscess was spreading steadily. 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.

A pope who took his responsibilities more seriously would have stifled the revolt before the end of 1517 by ordering Frederick
III to silence the mutinous Augustinian, imprison him, or cremate him. But Leo, for purely secular reasons, was courting Frederick.
It had been clear for some time that the reign of the great Max was nearing its end. Any European prince was eligible to succeed
him. The three obvious candidates, all mighty kings, were Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and young Carlos I of
Spain.

Henry could be omitted. He lacked the wealth to compete in the election, and he wasn’t much interested anyhow. Real power,
not the illusion of it, attracted the vigorous British monarch, and he knew that despite its lustrous name the glitter of
the imperial realm was fading. It was better known now as
die Romaisches Reich deutscher Nation
, a loose confederation whose leader, limited in his sovereignty, was voted into office by the archbishops of Mainz, Trier,
and Cologne; the count palatine of the Rhine; the king of Bohemia; the margrave of Brandenburg—and the duke of Saxony, then
Frederick III, Luther’s patron.

Unlike Henry, the kings of France and Spain coveted the imperial title. Though reduced to a symbol, it was deeply invested
with tradition and tied to the papacy in a hundred ways; as Maximilian had demonstrated, a shrewd diplomat could achieve much
by manipulating its panoply. But Pope Leo wanted neither Charles nor Francis. The new emperor, if able, would control Germany,
and any king who could unite Germany with either France or Spain would destroy the European balance of power that had preserved
the shaky autonomy of the Italian states since 1494. Leo preferred a minor prince, and because Frederick of Saxony was the
senior member of the electoral college, he settled on him. That explains his deference toward Frederick’s lenient treatment
of Luther. No other pontiff would have sent a cardinal to bargain with a monk—Cardinal Cajetan had misunderstood his mission
to Augsburg, because it was, by all precedents, inexplicable—and none other would have tolerated the stream of abusive Lutheran
pamphlets now issuing from Wittenberg. Committed to Frederick, Leo had even dispatched Von Miltitz to Wittenberg to offer
him “the Golden Rose,” an award popes conferred on princes as a sign of their highest favor. Leo hoped that would improve
the Saxon elector’s chances at Frankfurt am Main. Frederick, a man of honor, dismissed Miltitz and sent him back to Rome.

It had been a footling gesture. Carlos of Spain was not to be denied. He was prepared to become Emperor Charles V the way
Borgia had become pope—by buying the imperial crown. He went deeply into debt to do it, but he had a lot of collateral.
He ruled, not only Spain, but also Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Spain’s possessions abroad, the Habsburg holdings in Austria,
the Netherlands, Flanders, and Franche-Comté. Still, the empire, though shopworn, did not come cheap; his
Trinkgeld
—bribes to electors who put their votes on the market—came to 850,000 ducats, of which he had borrowed 543,000 from the
Fuggers.

German strength, which would prove indispensable to Luther, owed much to the new prosperity powered by the formidable Fuggers
and their fellow merchants. Unintimidated by rank, they insisted that they be paid what was owed them, and on time; when the
new emperor fell in arrears, Jakob Fugger II threatened to expose him: “It is well known that your Majesty without me might
not have acquired the imperial honor, as I can attest with the written statements of all the delegates,” he wrote, threatening
to do exactly that unless Charles immediately issued an “order that the money which I have paid out, together with the interest
on

Emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) (1500–1558)

it, shall be repaid without further delay.” Charles paid—mostly by giving Fugger the right to collect various royal revenues
in Spain.

C
HARLES HAD BEEN ELECTED
, but his coronation was more than a year away. That was long enough to form alliances, declare and win wars, unseat dynasties
—or nullify the choice of an emperorelect. Pope Leo, stubbornly refusing to concede defeat, continued to neglect his office,
by persevering in his courtship of Frederick the Wise. He seemed prepared to endure the Wittenberg insubordination indefinitely,
trusting that this lesser issue, which is how he regarded it, would yield to a peaceful solution. Lutheran ambivalence encouraged
him in this. Even before Leipzig, Luther had been suffering through what might be called an identity crisis. He had been trying
to define the papacy and his relationship to it. Meeting Von Miltitz in Altenburg in January 1919, he had appeared anxious
to preserve the unity of Christendom, offering to remain mute if his critics would also. He was prepared to issue public statements
acknowledging the wisdom of praying to saints and the reality of purgatory. He was also willing to urge his followers to make
peace with the Church, and would even concede the usefulness of indulgences in remitting canonical penances. To Tetzel, lying
on a monastic deathbed, he sent a gentle note, assuring him that the issue between them had been a minor incident in a larger
controversy, “that the affair had not been begun on that account, but that the child had quite another father.” In March he
even sent the pontiff a letter of submission.

This was young Luther redux—a flashback to the moment when, as a twenty-eight-year-old monk, he had first glimpsed the capital
of Catholicism and prostrated himself. Then a devout pilgrim, he had genuflected before saintly relics, worshiped at every
Roman altar, and scaled the Scala Santa on his knees. Now he wrote the Holy See in the same exalted mood. The response from
the Vatican, prompt and friendly, invited him to Rome for confession. But by then Luther’s inner struggle had resolved itself.
Leo’s overture was declined once more. Wittenberg, after all, was still safer for an avowed recreant, and as the dark doppelganger
within him reformed, he made his final, irrevocable turn away from Rome. The Luther who would make history was reemerging:
willful, selfless, intolerant, pious, brilliant, contemptuous of learning and art, but powerful in conviction and driven by
a vision of pure, unexploited Christianity.

In a brief, insightful passage he grasped this side of his temperament: “I have been born to war, and fight with factions
and devils; therefore my books are stormy and warlike. I must root out the stumps and stocks, cut away the thorns and hedges,
fill up the ditches, and am the rough forester to break a path and make things ready.” Thus, within a month of repledging
his allegiance to the Holy Father he wrote Georg Spalatin, chaplain to Frederick: “I am at a loss to know whether the Pope
is Antichrist or his apostle.” And in a more moderate but nevertheless revolutionary note, he suggested: “A common reformation
should be undertaken of the spiritual and temporal estates.”
^*

His followers, like him, were angry men; wrath was a red thread binding the Lutherans together. More and more—and especially
after Leipzig—they resembled an insurgent army, with Wittenberg as its command post and new hymns which sounded like marches.
Some members of his retinue left memorable contributions to polemical literature, but none could match the vehemence of their
leader when fully aroused. After reading the Curia’s continuing, uncompromising, absolute claims for the primacy and power
of Catholic pontiffs, he published an
Epitome
which opened by describing Rome as “that empurpled Babylon” and the Curia as “the Synagogue of Satan.” Three years earlier
he would have been shocked to read such a diatribe, let alone write it himself. Now it was only an overture.

“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.”