A World Lit Only by Fire (32 page)

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.

C
OAXED BACK
into hiding by his frantic protector, Junker Georg reluctantly grew a beard and wore knightly attire as a disguise. He slept
poorly, ate too much, grew fat, and suffered familiar hallucinations—he told his bodyguards that an apparition of the devil
had appeared, stinking up the place, but he had replied in kind, routing the demon “
mit einem Furz
” (“with a fart”). To Spalatin he sent a treatise on monastic vows, repudiating celibacy as a trap of Lucifer’s and declaring
sexual desire to be irrepressible. (Spalatin, embarrassed, hid the tract.) Finally Luther settled down on a stump, surrounded
himself with foolscap, and began compounding his crimes by translating the New Testament into German. But he remained restless.
“I had rather burn on live coals,” he wrote, “than rot here. … I want to be in the fray.”

Actually no one was thicker in it. Luther’s movement was sweeping northern Europe: first the free cities, led by Nuremberg;
then Saxony, Brandenburg, Prussia, Württemberg, Hesse, Brunswick, and Anhalt; then half Switzerland; then Scandinavia. Italy
and Spain never threatened to defect. Nor, after England turned, did Ireland; whatever the English were for, the Irish were
against. But for a time Catholicism seemed a lost cause in Bohemia, Transylvania, Austria, and even Poland. Converts could
be found in the unlikeliest places. Maximilian’s granddaughter Isabella—sister of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor—was
converted to Lutheranism. And the king of France tolerated Lutheran propaganda, decided purgatory did not exist, and turned
against the pope, though he never became a closet Protestant.
^*

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, and as he appointed
magistrates to fill the void left by ousted papal and episcopal appointees, his prestige among his people rose. They, however, had nothing to say about all this. The decision was
completely his. His subjects adopted whatever faith he chose; the various diets and councils which met throughout the century
to discuss tolerance—and eventually granted it, accepting the historic schism—were discussing the rights of rulers, not
the ruled. Religious freedom for the individual lay centuries away. It did not even exist as an abstraction.

Had men been offered choices, the result would have been chaotic. Protestantism was already confusing enough as it was. 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.