AFTER 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.

EVERY 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.

ON 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.

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.

CHARLES 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.”

BURNING A PAPAL BULL was, of course, a capital offense, but Luther had broken no law, because this bull was illegal. In the turmoil at the Vatican the Curia had been betrayed from within. The sixty day countdown had begun June 15, the day of the Exsurge Domine, and damned Luther on August 14. But under their own laws, this period of grace did not start to run until he had been handed the bull. And there the saboteurs had been particularly effective.

He should have received it before the end of July. Summer had been dry; even a slow courier could have accomplished the journey from Rome to Wittenberg in less than seven weeks. Yet it did not reach him until Octorber 10. In itself the injustice was slight; Luther was burning bridges as well as decrees. The significance of the delay lies in the identity of the obstructionists. 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. They also recalled—and this memory was bitter—how Pope Gregory VII had humiliated their leader six centuries later, forcing him to kneel in the snows of Canossa for three days before granting him absolution. Though Teutonic Obrigkeit, authority, remained in the hands of some three hundred independent princes, the Volk shared one language, one culture, and, increasingly, a sense of common identity. Their unanimity in the period may be overstated, but now that they were beginning to feel like Germans, Canossa and other old wounds were opened and nursed.

After the Church’s jubilee of 1500, when Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI, was pope, German pilgrims recrossing the Brenner Pass had returned with wild stories of Vatican orgies, the poisoning of pontiffs, homicidal cardinals, pagan rites in the Curia, and nuns practicing prostitution in the streets of Rome. But the roots of Germany’s burgeoning anticlericalism lay deeper than gossip. 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. In theory, a pontiff could dismiss any emperor, king, or prince if displeased with him. He wasn’t even obliged to cite a reason. 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, and conflicts between civil and episcopal courts could be settled, by pontifical fiat, in favor of the clerics.

Maximilian had nearly broken with the Vatican. In 1508 he had been barred from attending his own coronation in Rome by hostile Venetians. The schismatic Council of Pisa offered him the papacy. He declined then, but a year later he briefly considered separating the German church from Rome. In the end he was persuaded that he couldn’t rely on the support of German princes, but he went so far as to direct Jakob Wimpheling, the humanist, to draw up a list of Germany’s grievances against the papacy.

Heading Wimpheling’s complaints were protests against the Vatican’s systematic looting of German taxpayers, industries, and the vaults of noblemen. Maximilian himself calculated that the papacy reaped a hundred times more in German revenues than he did himself—an exaggeration, of course; nevertheless, businessmen, the most vigorous men in the new German society, did find themselves competing with monastic industries whose profits, Rome had ruled, were exempt from taxation. Long before Luther arrived to lead his disgruntled countrymen, the chancellor to an archbishop of Mainz had angrily written an Italian cardinal that “taxes are collected harshly, and no delay is granted … and war tithes imposed without consulting the German prelates. Lawsuits that ought to have been dealt with at home have been hastily transferred to the apostolic tribunal. The Germans have been treated as if they were rich and stupid barbarians, and drained of their money by a thousand cunning devices. … For many years Germany has lain in the dust, bemoaning her poverty and her sad fate. But now her nobles have awakened as from sleep; now they have resolved to shake off the yoke, and to win back their ancient freedom.”

Among his countrymen, pastors and even prelates agreed. Archbishop Berthold von Henneberg wrote: “The Italians ought to reward the Germans for their services, and not drain the sacerdotal body with frequent extortions of gold.” He was ignored. Relationships between pious churchgoers and the ecclesiastical hierarchy worsened. When Karl von Miltitz had journeyed to Altenburg to meet Luther, he had been astounded to find that half Germany seemed critical of the Vatican. So strong was antipapal feeling in Saxony that Miltitz evaded questions from natives, denied holding the pontiff’s commission, and assumed a false identity.

A Catholic historian notes that “a revolutionary spirit of hatred for the Church and the clergy had taken hold of the masses in various parts of Germany. … The cry ‘Death to the priests!’ which had long been whispered in secret, was now the watchword of the day.” Although the pope had remained ignorant of this festering discontent, the Curia knew of it. Rather than kindle an uprising there, the hierarchy had decided to exempt Germany from the Inquisition, and in 1516, the year before Luther posted his theses on the Castle Church door, one of the ablest men around the pontiff had warned him of imminent revolt in the heart of Europe.

HIS NAME WAS GIROLAMO ALEANDRO, Latinized to Hieronymus Aleander. Then just forty, he was a handsome Venetian whose arched brows, penetrating eyes, and thoughtful, pursed mouth suggested a professorial life. In part this was justified. Aleandro was an ecclesiastic of commanding intellect. A humanist and future cardinal, he was a celebrated member of Europe’s intelligentsia—rector of the University of Paris, a colleague of Erasmus, fluent in all classical tongues, and honored lecturer at Venice and Orleans. He was also a man of action, however, and as such he would become Luther’s first formidable Catholic adversary. Aleandro had anticipated the coming mutiny during an official visit to Austria. There, he told Pope Leo, he had repeatedly overheard men muttering that they yearned for the emergence of a man brave enough to lead them against Rome.

When the papacy issued a bull significant to one part of the Church’s vast realm, it was customary to dispatch eminent nuncios from Rome with bales of copies, which they would post in major population centers. Leo’s Exsurge Domine was such a document, and the dignitaries entrusted to inform all Germany of Luther’s shame were Aleandro and Johann Eck. To be chosen was regarded as an honor, and Eck, remembering his triumph over Luther in Leipzig the year before, set out with zest.

Aleandro, remembering his premonition, was less enthusiastic. Earlier in the week word had reached the Vatican that their reception would be, at best, mixed; Luther had been degraded in Rome, but he was no pariah to the north. Among his supporters were Franz von Sickingen, imperial chamberlain and one of the Holy Roman Empire’s seven electors; Philipp Melanchthon, the theologian; Lazaras Spengler, poet, and Stadtrat (councillor) of Nuremberg; and Willibald Pirkheimer, the translator of Greek classics into Latin. Albrecht Dürer was praying for Luther. Karlstadt, rallying to his cause, had published De canonicis scripturis libellus, a slender volume commending the Bible and derogating pontiffs, the Epistles, traditions, and ecumenical councils. In Mainz even Archbishop Albrecht was flirting with the rebels.

These were prominent, conservative Germans. Ulrich von Hutten was prominent, but no conservative; he was writing with the slashing, polemical pen of the new Lutherans. Calling for Germans to free themselves from Rome, he published an ancient German manuscript and noted pointedly: “While our forefathers”—the Goths and Huns—“thought it unworthy of them to submit to the Romans when Rome was the most martial nation in the world, we not only submit to these effeminate slaves of lust and luxury, but suffer ourselves to be plundered to minister to their sensuality.” Erasmus begged Hutten to mute his trumpet, but the poet laureate’s notes grew harder and harsher; that spring of 1520, demanding independence from Rome in Gespräche, a verse dialogue, he called the Vatican a “gigantic, bloodsucking worm,” adding: “The pope is a bandit chief, and his gang bears the name of the Church. … Rome is a sea of impurity, a mire of filth, a bottomless sink of iniquity. Should we not flock from all quarters to compass the destruction of this common curse of humanity?”

Eck and Aleandro began to move warily. At Döbeln, Turgau, and Leipzig the papal posters, with the distinctive red-letter imprint on each seal, were torn down. Eck was stunned. How could this happen in Leipzig? Debating Luther in this Catholic stronghold only a year earlier, he had scored a great triumph. By all the rules as he knew them, he should have been entitled to deference. But the Wittenberg heresy defied precedents. Humbling Luther in the great tapestried hall of Pleissenburg Castle had actually been a blunder. In Erfurt many professors, and even clergymen, scorned Eck and Aleandro and their pontifical proclamation; then a mob of students arrived and tossed all the remaining copies in the river. Eck panicked and fled. ^*

Aleandro was calmer—then. But less than six months later he too was appalled, writing the Curia from Hesse: “All Germany is up in arms against Rome. … Papal bulls of excommunication are laughed at. Numbers of people have ceased to receive the sacraments of penance. … Martin is pictured with a halo above his head. The people kiss these pictures. Such a quantity have been sold that I am unable to obtain one. … I cannot go out in the streets but the Germans put their hands to their swords and gnash their teeth at me. I hope the Pope will give me a plenary indulgence and look after my brothers and sisters if anything happens to me.”

In Wittenberg Luther was content. On June 11, 1520—four days before the promulgation of Exsurge Domine in Rome—he had written Spalatin: “I have cast the die. I now despise the rage of the Romans as much as I do their favor. I will not reconcile myself to them for all eternity. … Let them condemn and burn all that belongs to me; in return I will do as much for them. … Now I no longer fear, and I am publishing a book in the German tongue about Christian reform, directed against the pope, in language as violent as if I were addressing Antichrist.”

I AM PUBLISHING a book in the German tongue. … Although Martin Luther was a riddle of quirks and eccentricities, many wildly contradictory and some less than admirable, he was never a fool. At the outset he had been taken for one, but throughout 1520 events moved his way, partly because of the pope’s dawdling but also because Luther possessed intuitive political skills. He not only grasped the powerful Herrenvolk spirit rising throughout the fatherland; he had conceived an ingenious way to exploit it.

As noted, the medieval elect, like imperial Rome, had kept the masses ignorant by a kind of linguistic elitism. Upper-class Romans had embraced Greek forms and grammatical laws, despite the fact that these clashed with the natural rhythms of the Latin language; as a consequence, serious texts had been unreadable to the vast majority of the empire’s inhabitants. Their successors had followed the same pattern, adopting Latin as the tongue of men in power.

As new worlds of common speech struggled to be born, the humanists, with their veneration for antiquity, had actually played the role of obstructionists, fiercely criticizing Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio for writing in vernacular Tuscan, or Italian. The tide was beginning to run against them; sixteenth-century Italian intellectuals like Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Castiglione published in both Tuscan and Latin. In some parts of Europe—France, Castile, Portugal, and to a lesser degree England — public documents were appearing in vernacular.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, those to whom Latin was gibberish—everyone, that is, except the higher clergy, the learned, and affluent noblemen—could not decipher a word of official pronouncements, laws, manifestos issued by their rulers; of the liturgies, hymns, and sacred rites of the Church; or, of course, of either Testament of the Bible. Contemporary books were equally unintelligible to them; so were political pamphlets. There were exceptions: the works of John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Langland in England, and, across the Channel, those of François Villon. Villon, however, was virtually unique. Other Frenchmen, believing that serious “literature” could not be written in a common language, overloaded their work with Latinisms and were ridiculed as grands rhétoriquers.

In Luther’s homeland Sebastian Brandt’s Das Narrenschiff was a lonely masterpiece; even so, Brandt was no humanist and his work no triumph of the Renaissance; it was instead the last embodiment of medieval thought. The Germans had developed a vernacular literature, but the books published by Gutenberg’s successors were light entertainment—folktales, epics of ancient kings, the fantasies of Brunhilde—old wine, of poor vintage, rebottled for a people who could not even fathom the sermons read by their parish priests, let alone the tremendous issues raised in Wittenberg three years earlier and now keeping the new Holy Roman emperor awake nights.

Furthermore, and this was decisive for Luther, most Saxon, Austrian, Hessian, Pomeranian, Bavarian, Silesian, Brandenburg, and Westphalian nobles—the minor princes who would determine his fate during the coming winter—were equally handicapped. Only the wealthy could afford Latin teachers for their heirs. There were rich men in central Europe now, but they were in commerce; and trade, by tradition, was barred to the aristocracy. Von Hutten’s vitriolic leaflets were as meaningless to them as to their peasants. But like the peasantry, they could be reached through the tongue they had learned as children. Latin was precise, balanced, logical; a feast for scholars. But Luther knew he could be more effective, more eloquent, more moving —and would possess a far larger megaphone—if he addressed his people in simple German, einfach Deutsch.

HIS FIRST APPEAL in German, Sermon von den guten Werken, was issued in June 1520, a few days after the pontiff’s Exsurge Domine bull was proclaimed in Rome. It was followed by three defiant tracts, beginning with An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation—in full, An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate—and ending with Von der Freiheit eines Christenmanschen (Of the Freedom of a Christian Man). In sum, they constituted an untempered (and often intemperate) assault on the Roman Catholic Church in all its guises, sacraments, theological interpretations, and conduct of Christian affairs on earth.

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 twenty-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.

COAXED 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.

Perhaps the most popular Protestant dogma—and a striking illustration of how far removed that century was from this—was predestination: the tenet that God, being omniscient and omnipotent, is responsible for every action, virtuous and vile, and man is without choice. Luther, the ultimate determinist, could not grasp the concept of moral freedom. In De servo arbitrio (1525) he wrote: “The human will is like a beast of burden. … God foresees, foreordains, and accomplishes all things by an unchanging, eternal, and efficacious will. By this thunderbolt free will sinks shattered in the dust.”

But, dissenters replied, if no man’s actions can alter his fate—if his salvation or damnation are foreordained—why resist wicked temptations, or toil to improve the human condition, or even go to church? They argued furiously and endlessly, but never reasonably. 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.

In the spirit of the time, they celebrated their spiritual rebirths violently. Tirades led to recriminations, then to public executions. Autos-da-fé were more popular than ever. Peasants would walk thirty miles to hoot and jeer as a fellow Christian, enveloped in flames, writhed and screamed his life away. Afterward the most ardent spectators could be identified by their own singed hair and features; in their eagerness to enjoy the gamy scent of burning flesh, they had crowded too close. Ultimately this fascination with

The Reformation Monument, Geneva

death, as ordinary then as it seems extraordinary now, led to massive butchery—to spreading bloodstains of religious wars which crossed national frontiers and carried over into a new age.

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. Their faith cannot be indicted for their deaths. The homicidal lust had long been latent. Before the revolution, Christendom’s common people, as brutal as their leaders, had enjoyed the sport known to the Germans as Bärenhetze—setting famished dogs loose on a bear chained in a pit and watching them eat him alive. A part of them had wanted to be down in the pit, too. They had been awaiting an excuse for a rampage, and Worms would have provided it, whatever the outcome: the knights of Luther’s volunteer escort had sworn to kill him unless he refused to recant.

Even as word of his successful defiance spread across Germany, the mayhem had begun. Erfurt heard the news in the last days of April; a mob demolished forty houses belonging to the Church, burned rent rolls, razed a library, and, invading the university, killed a humanist scholar. In Wittenberg another mob, brandishing daggers and rocks, invaded a parish service; women kneeling before an image of the Madonna were stoned, and the priest driven out. The following day a band of students destroyed the altars of the city’s Franciscan monastery. Shortly thereafter, a leader of the local Augustinian congregation mounted a stump and called upon all who could hear him to follow their example—to roam the countryside, applying the ax to Catholic images, altars, and sacred paintings, and then feeding them to flames. Luther’s colleague, Professor Karlstadt, led students in assaults on local churches, tearing crucifixes and pictures from the walls and stoning priests who tried to intervene. Wearing civilian clothes, Karlstadt said the Mass in German and invited his congregation to celebrate holy communion by drinking from the chalice and taking the bread in their own hands—sacrilege in the eyes of Rome. He persuaded Wittenberg’s Ratsversammlung, the town’s council, to ban music at all religious services. Both monks and priests, he argued, should be required to wed, and he observed his fortieth birthday by setting an example, marrying a fifteen-year-old girl.

It was these disorders which had flushed Luther out of his sanctuary in the Thuringian Forest. His attitude toward violence had always been ambivalent. No Protestant, not even Hutten, had published prose as incendiary as Adel deutscher Nation, but now, confronted with the consequences, he drew back. It proved to be only the temporary lapse of a revolutionary. Nevertheless it was impressive. He preached: “Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women; shall we then prohibit wine and ban women? The sun, the moon, the stars, have been worshipped; shall we then pluck them out of the sky?”

Under his direction, both old and new communion rites were made available to Wittenbergers, and worshipers who cherished crucifixes, religious images, and holy music were left alone; as a composer of hymns, he himself approved of such solace. The Ratsversammlung, reversing itself, drove Karlstadt out of town. Unchastised, he took a pulpit in nearby Orlamünde to condemn Luther as a “gluttonous ecclesiastic … the new Wittenberg pope.” His congregation was swayed. Frederick the Wise, fearing an uprising—and it was coming—asked Luther to make the burghers of Orlamünde see reason. He tried, but nothing was sacred anymore, not even the man who, more than any other, had inspired them; the Orlamünders, refusing to listen to him, stoned him and pasted him with mud until he withdrew.

Hearing of the incident, Thomas Müntzer, another former Lutheran turned radical Anabaptist, published a pamphlet calling his former idol “Dr. Liar [Dr. Lügner],” a “shameless monk” who spent his time “whoring and drinking.” Müntzer was openly calling on the serfs to revolt; in a leaflet, Ermahnung zum Frieden (Admonition to Peace), Luther begged them to be patient. They rose anyway, and when their rebellion collapsed—nearly 100,000 peasant deaths later—Karlstadt was threatened with prosecution as an instigator. Ironically, he turned to Luther for refuge. It was quickly granted, and Karlstadt, weary of struggle, hoarse from his polemics, and exhausted by the demands of his teenaged bride, returned to teaching. He died, an obscure professor in Basel, fifteen years later. Müntzer was less fortunate. He led rebellious peasants against seasoned troops in Saxony. The defeat of the rebels was followed by an orgy of medieval brutality; five thousand men were put to the sword. Some three hundred were spared when their women agreed to beat out the brains of two priests suspected of encouraging the uprising. Then Müntzer himself was tortured to the point of death and beheaded.

LUTHER had been among the captivated readers of Erasmus’s Encomium moriae. The eminent humanist was now busy at the University of Louvain’s Collegium Trilingue, with professorships in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and on March 18, 1519, Luther had written him there, humbly soliciting his support. It was a curious appeal, revealing a total misunderstanding of everything Erasmus represented. Replying on May 30, the scholar suggested that it “might be wiser of you to denounce those who misuse the Pope’s authority than to censure the Pope himself. … Old institutions cannot be uprooted in an instant. Quiet argument may do more than wholesale condemnation. Avoid all appearance of sedition. Keep cool. Do not get angry. Do not hate anybody.”

Erasmus continued to defend Luther. In the Axiomata Erasmi, a statement addressed to Frederick of Saxony, he declared that men who loved the gospel were those least resentful of the Wittenberg monk; Christians were demanding evangelical truth, he added, and could not be suppressed. To Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio he sent a long letter which began with the observation that during his travels “I perceived that the better a man was, the less he was Luther’s enemy. … If we want truth, every man ought to be free to say what he thinks without fear. If the advocates of one side are to be rewarded with miters, and the advocates of the other side with rope or stake, truth will not be heard.” He now knew that the Exsurge Domine had been genuine, but believed that “nothing could have been more invidious or unwise than the Pope’s bull. It was unlike Leo X, and those who were sent to publish it”—Eck and Aleandro—“only made things worse.” He concluded: “You may assure yourself that Erasmus has been, and always will be, a faithful subject of the Roman See. But I think, and many will think with me, that there would be a better chance of settlement if there were less ferocity.”

But thus far the greater ferocity had come from Rome’s critics. If Luther had badly misjudged Erasmus, Erasmus’s misjudgment of Luther was complete. There is no other way to interpret his May 30, 1519, letter to him. It was an offer of reasonable advice to an unreasonable fundamentalist. As such, it was not only wasted but probably incomprehensible to the monk, whose sensible preaching to the Wittenbergers had been out of character; who, most of the time, spoke the language of invective. The monk in Wittenberg was by nature everything the scholar in Louvain asked him not to be: inflammatory, passionate, seditious, hot, furious, and a born hater. That was his magic, and it was also part of his genius. Erasmus had deplored injustice without result; Luther hated it with great results. One man was thoughtful, the other intuitive.

However, intuition, though it fuels action, is volatile and therefore dangerous. And Luther’s sense of justice was selective. Though he was outraged by the peasant revolt, he remained silent on the one early excess of Protestantism which offended learned Europeans most. The Erfurt mob’s murder of a humanist, an innocent bystander, was an omen to his fellow humanists. Intellectuals everywhere were caught entre deux feux—in peril, as, in times of bloodlust, they have always been. By exposing Roman corruption and eroding blind acceptance of medieval superstition, thoughtful men had opened the way for reform, but the reformers, being emotional men, did not acknowledge the debt. On the contrary; the “Martinians,” as Luther’s followers called themselves, accepted what was coming to be known as the Zwickau Dogma, named after the town in which it originated. The dogmatists held that God spoke directly to simple men in simple language, that they instinctively understood him, and that the true Christian spurned literature, even reading and writing. Karlstadt, though learned, had first destroyed his own books and then declared that true believers should confine themselves to tilling the ground or working with their hands. George Mohr, a colleague and protégé, resigned from the faculty to preach the joys of illiteracy, and a number of Wittenberg undergraduates, seeing no point in further study, left their lecture halls to become craftsmen.

Intolerance, contempt for learning, the burning of religious art, the rejection of classical culture as pagan, and the adoption of primitive papal tactics—book burning, excommunication, even death at the stake—alienated humanists who had at first defended Luther: Johannes Cochlaeus, dean at Frankfurt am Main; Johannes Reuchlin, who had stopped the burning of Luther’s books and as a result faced trial as a heretic; Willibald Pirkheimer, the Nuremberg merchant, scholar, and friend of Dürer, whom Erasmus had called “the chief glory of Germany” and who had been excommunicated for his open defense of Luther; Conradus Mutianus Rufus of Gotha; and Erasmus himself.

The Vatican had shielded scholars and sponsored their successful searches for the lost treasures of classical learning, provided, of course, they confined themselves to Latin and Greek. The humanists had approved of reforming the Church, but had not bargained for Protestant ravings about predestination and hell and demons and all the baggage of supernaturalism which, to them, signified a reactionary return to medievalism. Mutianus had called Luther “the morning star of Wittenberg.” Now, according to Durant, he decided that he behaved with “the fury of a maniac.” Cochlaeus, another early admirer of Luther, wrote him: “Christ does not teach such methods as you are carrying out so offensively with ‘Antichrist,’ ‘brothels,’ ‘Devil’s nests,’ ‘cesspools,’ and other unheard-of terms of abuse, not to speak of your threatenings of sword, bloodshed, and murder,” adding: “O Luther, you were never taught this method of working by Christ!” Pirkheimer wrote: “Things have come to a pass that the popish scoundrels are made to appear virtuous by the Evangelical ones. … Luther, with his shameless, ungovernable tongue, must have lapsed into insanity, or been inspired by the Evil Spirit.”

When Erasmus agreed, Luther denounced him as a quixotic dreamer who “thinks that all can be accomplished with civility and benevolence.” Erasmus was offended. He was, and knew himself to be, the most eminent scholar of his time. But other Martinians were harder on him than their leader. Some scorned him as a renegade; others, in the words of a later critic, as “a begging parasite, who had [sense] enough to discover the truth, and not enough to profess it.” Still others denounced him as a Vatican stooge, on the pope’s payroll. That was terribly unjust. It was true that in Louvain Erasmus was as dependent upon Catholic wealth as Michelangelo in Rome; true also that he owed his bread, his books, and his very clothing to pensions from an archbishop, a baron, and the Holy Roman emperor, all loyal to the Holy See. However, he had accepted them only on the condition that he would retain his intellectual independence. And he continued to exercise it. In Cologne, in Frederick III’s inn rooms—where he had saved Luther, who never thanked him, and enraged Aleandro, who never forgave him—he had shown that he was no papal pawn. That was merely an omen; as the interfaith conflict grew, so did his courage.

ERASMUS was not without weakness. He was guilty of all the familar academic sins. He overestimated the power of logic, assumed that intelligent men are rational, and believed that through his friendships with the European elite—the emperor, the pope, King Francis I, King Henry VIII, Italian princes, German barons, the lord chancellor of England, and virtually every learned man on the Continent—he could alter events. Although he privately regarded conventional religion as a stew of superstitions, he could envisage no institution which would replace the Roman faith as an enforcer of social discipline and private morality. In Christendom’s widening civil war, he foresaw only madness, and he believed the Catholic infrastructure could be set aright if he brought his wisdom to bear on its flaws. Hans Holbein’s portrait in oils, now in the Louvre, captures the inner Erasmus: thin-lipped, longnosed, the eyes hooded, the expression forbidding. It may be seen as a study in intellectual arrogance. “I do not admit,” he wrote, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels.”

But he was wise. No other figure on the European stage saw the religious crisis so clearly; if he was vain to suppose that he could impose his solution on it, the fact remains that no other solution made sense. And despite the judgment of his contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, he was no weakling. In rejecting Luther’s overture he had assured his own isolation, for obscurantist Catholic theologians deeply distrusted him. They not only blamed Erasmus for Luther’s defection; they suspected him of being his amanuensis. “These men,” he had written to Luther, “cannot by any means be disabused of the suspicion that your works are written by my aid, and that I am, as they call it, the standard-bearer [vexillarius] of your party. … I have testified to them that you are entirely unknown to me, that I have not read your books, and neither approve nor disapprove of your writings, but that they should read them before they speak so loudly. … It was no use; they are as mad as ever. … I am myself the chief object of animosity.”

That animosity grew, for although he would not abandon Rome—“I endure the Church till the day I shall see another [better] one,” he wrote—he refused to mute either his suggestions for Catholic reforms or his criticism of those who had dishonored their vows. The Vatican should encourage tolerance, he wrote; its hostility toward all change was senseless. He offered suggestions. The Church was too rich; vast tracts of its arable land should be turned over to those who farmed them. The clergy ought to be allowed to marry. Worshipers might be offered alternate forms of communion. Predestination appalled him, but he thought it should be studied, discussed, and debated by priests with open minds. And something must be done about promiscuous nuns and lecherous, thieving, forging, drunken monks; “in many monasteries the last virtue to be found is chastity,” and “many convents” had become “public brothels.”

HE CONTINUED to correspond with Pope Leo X and, later, his successors, Adrian VI and Clement VII. All instructed the Curia to extend him every courtesy, but they were ignored. The fog of religious strife was, if anything, thicker than those of secular wars; obscurant theologians in Rome and hard-liners in the dioceses abroad saw the widening apostasy as an opportunity to stifle dissent. In Catholic Louvain they were particularly active, even among Erasmus’s colleagues, and their suspicion of him rose on October 8, 1520, when Aleandro arrived there to promulgate Luther’s excommunication. He spread word that the great scholar was the secret mastermind behind Protestant revolts. The faculty, reasoning that the nuncio ought to know, was preparing to expel its most learned colleague when, anticipating his critics, he abruptly left.

Erasmus moved to Cologne, then still loyal to the pontiff. Rumors that he was a closet Lutheran followed him, however; strangers accosted him with the charge that he had laid the egg Luther hatched. “Yes,” he would wryly reply, “but the egg I laid was a hen, whereas Luther has hatched a gamecock.” By late 1521 he was fed up with them; in mid-November he renounced his pensions, moved up the Rhine to Basel, Switzerland, and settled among a nucleus of humanists. Here he enjoyed a respite; elsewhere priests were using his name as a synonym for treachery, but the Swiss, committed to Protestantism in various forms, left him alone.

They did not, however, leave Catholicism alone. Inflamed by evangelist preachers, a Basel mob rioted, broke into every Catholic church in the vicinity, and destroyed all religious images. As it happened, Erasmus himself had recently impeached the veneration of images, writing that “people should be taught that these are no more than signs; it would be better if there were none at all, and prayer were addressed only to Christ.” He had, however, added: “But in all things let there be moderation.” The immoderate, rioting vandals had ruptured the thin membrane of civility which he cherished. Disgusted, he showed Switzerland his heels, moving this time to Freiburg im Breisgau, in Catholic Austria. By now Christendom was so confused that no one thought his source of support odd. Actually his bills were being paid by the Fuggers, staunch Catholics who were, at the same time, quietly supporting Protestants in Catholic Venice.

Nevertheless he found no peace there, either. Austrian opinion about him was divided. Freiburg’s Stadtrat (town council), welcoming Europe’s most illustrious intellectual, moved him into Maximilian’s imperial palace, but the local Augustinians were aware of, and resented, his presence among them. During his Swiss idyll, hereticators had been smearing him all over the Continent. Using techniques which would reemerge in later ages, they identified him as the leader of apostate conspiracies, muttering, in Europe’s many tongues, one of mankind’s oldest and most insidious apothegms: Es gibt keinen Rauch ohne Feuer—Where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Erasmus was now approaching seventy. Racked with pain from several afflictions—gallstones, ulcers, gout, dysentery, respiratory disease, arthritis, and pancreatitis—he also felt suffocated by suspicion. In his final flight he returned to Basel. There, after years of wandering, pursued by lies, he passed away in the home of Jerome Froben, son of the scholar-publisher Johann, who had first published his Latin translation of the Greek New Testament.

Erasmus died a martyr to everything he had despised in life: fear, malice, excess, ignorance, barbarism. And his martyrdom did not end at the grave. He had known that his life was ebbing, yet asked for neither priest nor confessor. Word that he had refused last rites found its way to Spain, where the rekindled Inquisition, having completed a systematic study of his books, began formal proceedings against the doyen of humanism, thereby setting in motion wheels which, eight years later, would grind out a formal denunciation of Erasmus. He was excommunicated and branded a heretic. Under the violent reactionary Pope Paul IV, who as a cardinal had reorganized the Inquisition, everything Erasmus had ever published was consigned to the Index Expurgatorius, which meant that any Catholic who read the prose which had once delighted a pontiff would be placing his soul in jeopardy. ^*

ERASMUS WAS the most eminent intellectual victimized by the revolution, but he was far from alone. Indeed, once the lines of battle had been drawn, humanists everywhere were hostages to one side or the other, and sometimes to both. Reason itself had become suspect: tolerance was seen as treachery. Luther, once he had survived Worms, was shielded by Frederick the Wise and the gathering armies of Protestantism. 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 pincers.

At the outbreak of the revolution most of the humanists had been ordained priests, and several, because of their eminence, were picked by their superiors to serve as blacklisters, leading the Church’s counterrevolution. Suspecting Protestant sympathies among his clergy, the bishop of Meaux appointed Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples his vicar general with instructions to weed them out. Lefèvre, then approaching seventy, was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, the author of works on physics, mathematics, and Aristotelian ethics, and a Latin translation of Saint Paul’s Epistles. His former pupils—the bishop was one of them—revered him without exception.

But although he wore vestments and celebrated Mass, Lefèvre was above all a humanist. To expose medieval myths, he proposed a clearer version of the original New Testament. He was working on a French translation of the Bible, and—like Luther — he believed that the Gospels, not papal decrees, should be the ultimate court of theological appeal. Lefèvre was incautious enough to observe also that he thought it “shameful” that bishops should devote their days to hunting and their nights to drinking, gambling, and mounting putains—a criticism which was ill received in Meaux. Suddenly the hunter of heretics was himself condemned as one, and by the Sorbonne at that. Fleeing Paris, he found sanctuary in Strasbourg, in Blois, and, finally, in Nérac, with Marguerite of Angoulême, queen of Navarre and protectress of the revolution’s humanist refugees. There he resumed his scholarship and died quietly, of natural causes, five years later.

Lefèvre was one of Marguerite’s successes. She also had her failures, notably Bonaventure Desperiers and Étienne Dolet. Both were given her best efforts; nevertheless both died violently in Lyons. Desperiers had been guilty only of bad timing; had he published his Cymbalum mundi before Luther challenged Rome, the Curia would have ignored it. Written in Latin and addressed to fellow humanists, it noted the flagrant contradictions in the Bible, deplored the persecution of heretics, and mocked miracles. There was nothing new here. The satires of Erasmus and the German heretics, making the same points, had been more caustic. But in the new age of intolerance, Cymbalum was denounced by both sides—the Catholic witchhunters in the Sorbonne and the Protestant Calvin. Then it was publicly burned by the official hangman of Paris. Desperiers became too hot even for Marguerite; she was forced to banish him from Nérac. She sent him money, but the pressure was too much for him. On the run, threatened and hounded, he died, reportedly by his own hand. Dolet, on the other hand, courted death. A printer as well as a Ciceronian scholar, he clandestinely published books on the Index Expurgatorius until he was summoned before the Inquisition, found guilty, and, despite Marguerite’s attempts to intervene, burned alive.

Some humanists were victims; some became leaders of the revolt. All, when captured, met hideous deaths. Those who had led became martyrs, but the deaths of leaders and led seem equally senseless. In his Christianismi restitutio (The Restitution of Christianity) the Spanish-born theologian and physician Michael Servetus dismissed predestination as blasphemy; God, he wrote, condemns only those who condemn themselves. Servetus was naive enough to send a copy to a preacher who believed in predestination as the revealed word and who, knowing which church Servetus would attend and when, had him ambushed at prayer. A Protestant council sentenced him to death by slow fire. Now terrified, aware of his blunder, the condemned author begged for mercy—not for his life; he knew better than that; he merely wanted to be beheaded. He was denied it. Instead he was burned alive. It took him half an hour to die.

The Catholics who quartered the body of the Swiss Huldrych Zwingli and burned it on a pyre of dried exrement were equally merciless; so was Martin Luther, who had regarded Zwingli as a rival and called his ghastly death “a triumph for us.” In the darkness enveloping Christendom no one recalled that as a young priest the slain Swiss had taught himself Greek to read the New Testament in the original and possessed a profound knowledge of Tacitus, Pliny, Homer, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, and Caesar. All they remembered was that he had said he would prefer “the eternal lot of a Socrates or a Seneca than of a pope.”

Perhaps the most poignant figure in the strife—and certainly one of the most tragic—was Ulrich von Hutten. Once he had distinguished himself as a humanist, a Franconian knight, a brilliant satirist, and one of the first scholars in central Europe to cherish the vision of a unified Germany. Like Luther, he had abandoned Latin to help shape the German language as it is spoken today; his Gesprächbüchlein, published the year after Worms, was a greater contribution to linguistics than to theology. But Hutten was one of the committed humanists, and like most Reformation zealots he displayed more enthusiasm than judgment. Unwisely, he had cast his lot with Von Sickingen, whose defeat transformed him into a penniless fugitive robbing farms for food as he fled toward Switzerland. Reaching it, he headed straight for Basel, and Erasmus. He expected his fellow humanist to support him, but that was asking too much. Not only had his vehement rhetoric offended the man who preached moderation and tolerance; Hutten had denounced Erasmus as craven for not supporting Luther. Now, in Basel, the victim of his abuse refused to receive him, wryly explaining that his stove provided too little heat to warm the German’s bones.

Angry, desperate, and ill—his affliction was venereal—Hutten abandoned both dignity and decency by turning to extortion. He wrote a scurrilous pamphlet about Erasmus (Expostulation) and offered to suppress it in exchange for money. Erasmus indignantly refused. Then Hutten began circulating it privately. The local clergy asked Basel’s city fathers to expel the polemicist, and it was done. Hutten moved to Mulhouse and sent his manuscript to the press. A mob drove him out. In the summer of 1523 he stumbled into Zurich, only to find that there, too, the city council was preparing a motion of expulsion. Homeless, broke, banished from society, he retreated to an island in the Lake of Zurich, and there, aged thirty-five, he succumbed to syphilis. His sole possession was his pen. Valuable only a year earlier, it was now worthless.

ALL PROTESTANT regimes were stiffly doctrinal to a degree unknown—until now—in Rome. John Calvin’s Geneva, however, represented the ultimate in repression. The city-state of Genève, which became known as the Protestant Rome, was also, in effect, a police state, ruled by a Consistory of five pastors and twelve lay elders, with the bloodless figure of the dictator looming over all. In physique, temperament, and conviction, Calvin (1509–1564) was the inverted image of the freewheeling, permissive, high-living popes whose excesses had led to Lutheran apostasy. Frail, thin, short, and lightly bearded, with ruthless, penetrating eyes, he was humorless and short-tempered. The slightest criticism enraged him. Those who questioned his theology he called “pigs,” “asses,” “riffraff,” “dogs,” “idiots,” and “stinking beasts.” One morning he found a poster on his pulpit accusing him of “Gross Hypocrisy.” A suspect was arrested. No evidence was produced, but he was tortured day and night for a month till he confessed. Screaming with pain, he was lashed to a wooden stake. Penultimately, his feet were nailed to the wood; ultimately he was decapitated.

Calvin’s justification for this excessive rebuke reveals the mindset of all Reformation inquisitors, Protestant and Catholic alike: “When the papists are so harsh and violent in defense of their superstitions,” he asked, “are not Christ’s magistrates shamed to show themselves less ardent in defense of the sure truth?” Clearly, he would have condemned the Jesus of Matthew (5:39, 44) as a heretic. ^* In Calvin’s Orwellian theocracy, established in 1542, acts of God—earthquakes, lightning, flooding—were acts of Satan. (Luther, of course, agreed.) Copernicus was branded a fraud, attendance at church and sermons was compulsory, and Calvin himself preached at great length three or four times a week. Refusal to take the Eucharist was a crime. The Consistory, which made no distinction between religion and morality, could summon anyone for questioning, investigate any charge of backsliding, and entered homes periodically to be sure no one was cheating Calvin’s God. Legislation specified the number of dishes to be served at each meal and the color of garments worn. What one was permitted to wear depended upon who one was, for never was a society more class-ridden. Believing that every child of God had been foreordained, Calvin was determined that each know his place; statutes specified the quality of dress and the activities allowed in each class.

But even the elite—the clergy, of course—were allowed few diversions. Calvinists worked hard because there wasn’t much else they were permitted to do. “Feasting” was proscribed; so were dancing, singing, pictures, statues, relics, church bells, organs, altar candles; “indecent or irreligious” songs, staging or attending theatrical plays; wearing rouge, jewelry, lace, or “immodest” dress; speaking disrespectfully of your betters; extravagant entertainment; swearing, gambling, playing cards, hunting, drunkenness; naming children after anyone but figures in the Old Testament; reading “immoral or irreligious” books; and sexual intercourse, except between partners of different genders who were married to one another.

To show that Calvinists were merciful, first offenders were let off with reprimands and two-time losers with fines. After that, those who flouted the law were in real trouble. The Consistory made no allowances for probation, suspended sentences, or rehabilitation programs, and Calvin assumed that everyone enjoyed community service without being sentenced to it. Excommunication and banishment from the community were considered dire, though those living in a more permissive age might find them less appalling. In any event, there were plenty of other penalties, some of them as odd as the offenses they punished. A father who stubbornly insisted upon calling his newborn son Claude spent four days in the canton jail; so did a woman convicted of wearing her hair at an “immoral” height. A child who struck his parents was summarily beheaded. Abortion was not a political issue because any single woman discovered with child was drowned. (So, if he could be identified, was her impregnator.) Violating the seventh commandment was also a capital offense. Calvin’s stepson was found in bed with another woman; his daughter-in-law, behind a haystack with another man. All four miscreants were executed.

Of course, it proved impossible to legislate virtue. Some of Calvin’s devoted followers insisted that it was possible, that the Consistory’s moral straitjacket worked; Bernardino Ochino, an ex-Catholic who had found asylum in the city-state, wrote that “Unchastity, adultery, and impure living, such as prevail in many places where I have lived, are here unknown.” In fact they were widely known there; the proof lies in the council’s records. A remarkable number of unmarried young woman who worshiped with Ochino managed to carry their pregnancies to term unde-

John Calvin (1509–1564)

tected. Some abandoned their issue on church steps or alongside forest trails; some named their male co-conspirator, who then married them at sword’s point; some lived as single parents, for not even Calvinists could orphan an innocent infant.

On other issues they were adamant, however. The ultimate crime, of course, was heresy. It was even blacker than witchcraft, though sorcerers could not be expected to appreciate the distinction; after a devastating outbreak of plague, fourteen Geneva women, found guilty of persuading Satan to afflict the community, were burned alive. But because the soul was more precious than the flesh, the life expectancy of the apostate was even shorter. Anyone whose church attendance became infrequent was destined for the stake. Holding religious beliefs at odds with those of the majority was no excuse in Geneva or, for that matter, in other Protestant theocracies. It was a consummate irony of the Reformation that the movement against Rome, which had begun with an affirmation of individual judgment, now repudiated it entirely. Apostasy was regarded as an offense to God and treason to the state. As such it was punished with swift, agonizing death. One historian wrote, “Catholicism, which had preached this view of heresy, became heresy in its turn.”

THE POPE, AFTER ALL, was a Catholic, if not a very good one, and because his Church hadn’t changed its view of heresy, one might have expected him to have met the Protestant revolt with a terrible swift response. The dimensions of the threat were staggering. But Leo failed to perceive this; he had learned nothing since Worms. To him the great split in his realm was still “a squabble among monks,” and he assumed that all pious men were governed by Augustine Triumphus’s Summa de ecclesiastica potestate (1326), promulgated two centuries earlier by Pope John XXII, which had decreed that as God’s vice-regent on earth, a pontiff must be obeyed, even when he is a great sinner.

Leo wasn’t a great sinner, but religion ranked rather low in his priorities, below learning, living well, serving as head of the Medici family, and making war. He was one of history’s great squanderers; according to Francesco Cardinal Armellini Medici, treasurer of the Holy See, he spent 5 million ducats during his seven years in the Vatican and left debts exceeding 800,000. How much of this went into supporting Charles V’s imperial armies is unknown, but Leo was committed to France’s defeat, not because of Francis I’s secret sympathies for Protestantism—he had no inkling of that—and not even because, like Pope Julius, he was pursuing realistic political goals. Despite Charles’s military successes, which would culminate in his great victory over the French at Bicocca, Leo’s only spoils were two provinces in northern Italy, hardly worth the loss of Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia to Protestantism.

Nevertheless an excuse for a celebration was a temptation Leo could not resist. On the last evening in November 1521 he held an all-night banquet at the Vatican, complete with fine wines, champagne, gambling, music, theatricals, acrobats, fireworks, and his many nipoti, including three nephews and two cousins, all wearing the cardinals’ hats he had bestowed upon them. As always, he had a marvelous time, though the price turned out to be extravagant, even by his standards. At dawn, as his guests departed, he withdrew, explaining that he felt ill. He had caught a chill. By noon he was running a fever, which, by nightfall, had killed him.

He was forty-six years old. He was also bankrupt. Armellini found there wasn’t enough money in the pontiff’s vaults to provide candles for Leo’s coffin; he had to use melted-down stubs from the last cardinalate funeral. Had the dead pope been spared, Roman wags said, he would have sold Rome, then Christ, then himself. He had sponsored magnificent painting and sculpture, which should have counted for something, but there were few kind words for him that bleak December. Because he had mishandled the Protestant apostasy, wrote Francesco Vettori, a contemporary historian, Leo had left the papacy in the “lowest possible repute.” In the streets of Rome men hissed the sacred college on its way to choose his successor.

Their contempt was unjustified. For the first time in nearly a century their eminences chose well. They hadn’t meant to; the outcome was unexpected, the consequence of a three-way deadlock. In a move to break it, someone nominated Adrian Cardinal Boeyens of Utrecht, the emperor’s childhood mentor, who wasn’t even present. Rival blocs, trying to outmaneuver one another, wound up outfoxing their own interests; to their horror, they found they had actually elected the unknown prelate, who thereby became Adrian VI, the only Dutch pope in history—“the Barbarian,” as Romans immediately began calling him. ^* That is precisely what he was not. 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 only qualified candidates for the priesthood were ordained, but his orders always miscarried. Unable to bridge the cultural barrier with the Italians around him—only two of his aides were Dutch—he was thwarted at every turn by the entrenched Curia, and after a year in office he died, unmourned, having been, wrote Vettori, “a little and despised pope.”

THE ITALIAN CARDINALS, grateful for the chance to rectify their mistake so soon, now turned to one of their own: Giulio de’ Medici, a cousin of Leo X, who became Pope Clement VII (r. 1523-1534). Weak and vacillating, Clement tried to play Charles V and Francis I off against one another. He entered into secret treaties with each, and was exposed, thereby earning the distrust of both. Italy became a bleak battleground. Two Englishmen crossing Lombardy wrote home of starving children in Pavia, adding that “the most goodly countree for corne and vynes that may be seen is so desolate that in all that ways we sawe [not] oon man or woman in the fylde, nor yet creatour stirring, but in great villages five or six myserable persons.”

It never seems to have occurred to this pope that Rome itself was vulnerable to mayhem—that his fellow Christians might repeat the Visigothic sack of the Eternal City. Yet his alliances with France offended Romans loyal to the Holy Roman emperor, and as a Medici he had inherited enemies, among them Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a feuder, a hater, and an ambitious prelate who had his eye on the papal tiara. Colonna plotted Clement’s assassination. Rallying imperialists, he led a raid on the Vatican in 1526. Several members of the papal household were killed, but the pope

Pope Clement VII (1478-1534)

himself escaped through a secret passageway built for this express purpose by the Borgia pope, who had been better at this sort of thing than he was.

The pontiff and the ferocious cardinal reached terms and the raiders withdrew, whereupon Clement, after granting himself absolution, hired a band of mercenaries and leveled Colonna’s properties. He felt victorious, and congratulated himself. Yet the sacrilegious behavior of the raiders should have warned him of worse to come. Donning the Holy Father’s robes while he escaped through the hidden passage, they had pranced about the piazza of St. Peter’s, mocking the Vicar of Christ. A papal secretary of state wrote the papal nuncio in England—where the devout King Henry VIII worried about the safety of His Holiness—“We are on the brink of ruin.”

The seeds of ruin lay in the ill-disciplined, famished, unpaid troops of Charles V, who had outfought King Francis’s army, crossed the Alps, and were at large in northern Italy. Led by the Constable de Bourbon, a French renegade, their spearhead was formed of Landsknechte (mercenaries) from central Europe, and the defenders heard a cry which one day would intimidate all Europe, the roaring “Hoch! Hoch!” of charging German infantry. As Protestants, these Teutons affected to despise the pope as a heretical ally of their enemy, but their chief inspiration was less lofty. It was greed: the prospect of plunder and ransoms in Florence and Rome, promised them by their commanders. Charles himself seems to have been unaware of this. His own reverence for the See of St. Peter led him to grant his foes an eight-month armistice in exchange for 60,000 ducats, to be distributed among his troops. It wasn’t enough. Enraged, believing themselves betrayed, men of the imperial army mutinied and marched on the capital of Christendom, given free passage and even food by Italian princes who had been victims of Medici popes. On May 6, 1527, they burst into Rome. One of the first victims of the assault was the Constable de Bourbon, killed by a sniper on the Roman walls. Any hope of disciplining the mutineers died with him. They pillaged house to house, murdering anyone who protested. Buildings were put to the torch. Then the dying began.

Clement, most of the sacred college, and many Curia officials found sanctuary in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though they barely made it—one cardinal was hauled to safety in a basket after the portcullis had been dropped. But the rest of the population was helpless. Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomized, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than 2,000 bodies were floating in the Tiber, some 9,800 others awaited burial, and countless thousands of corpses lay sprawled in the city’s ruins, their bloated, stinking remains eviscerated by rats and hungry dogs.

The soldiers had come for money, and they got it—between 3 million and 4 million ducats in ransoms alone. The rich were scourged, and the lucky, who could pay, freed. Those who produced no ransom were tortured to death. But the plunder did not stop there. No source of loot was overlooked. Tombs were broken open for treasure, relics stripped of their jeweled covers, monasteries, palaces, and churches rifled for their gems and plate.

The fortress Castel Sant’ Angelo, Rome

There was also sacking for the sheer wicked joy of desecration. Archives and libraries went up in flames, with manuscript pages saved only to be used as bedding for horses. The Vatican was turned into a stable. Drunken Landsknechte strutted around in the red hats and vestments of cardinals, parodying holy rites, with one, wearing the pontiff’s vestments, riding an ass. All this continued, off and on, for eight months, until the food ran out and plague appeared. Only then did the mutineers withdraw, having transformed the glory that was Rome into a reeking slaughter-house.

As news of the sack spread across Europe, Protestants interpreted it as an act of divine retribution. And some Catholics agreed. A senior officer in Charles’s army, while deploring “these outrages on the Catholic religion and the Apostolic See,” commented, “In truth everyone is convinced that all this has happened as a judgment of God on the great tyranny and disorders of the papal court.” Cardinal Cajetan, who had met Luther in Augsburg nine years earlier, agreed. “We who should have been the salt of the earth,” he wrote with heavy heart, “have decayed until we are good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials.”

BUT MOST MEMBERS of the Catholic hierarchy saw it differently. Now, they believed, they had seen the faces of the Protestant heresy—the fact that half the looting troops had been Spanish Catholics was ignored—and now they would move with just as much vigor, intolerance, and brutality as those rebelling against their God. Sir Isaac Newton would not discover his Third Law until a generation later, but it was already in effect: henceforth every action by the insurgent Christians would provoke an equal and opposite reaction in Rome. And the Church’s reflexive responses to dissent matched those of the schismatics. The same doom, in the same guise, awaited those who had betrayed Rome: torture, drawing and quartering, the noose, the ax, and, most often, the stake. In that age the world was still lit only by fire. At times it seemed that the true saints of Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, had become blackened martyrs enveloped in flames.

In vain enlightened Catholics urged internal disciplinary reforms, curing the blight which had driven good Christians from their ancestors’ faith—the corruption of the clergy, the luxurious lives led by prelates, the absence of bishops from their dioceses, and nepotism in the Holy See. At the very least, they argued, pontiffs should rededicate themselves to devotional lives, good works, and the reaffirmation of beliefs under attack by Protestants: for example, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the divinity of the Madonna, the sanctity of Peter.

Instead the Vatican committed its prestige to reaction, repression, and military and political action against rulers who had left the Church. As always, when scapegoating has become public policy, the Jews were blamed. In Rome they were confined to a ghetto and forced to wear the Star of David. Meantime, Catholic princes were persuaded to make war in the name of the savior, or

Lutheran satire on papal reform

even to send hired assassins into the courts and castles of the Protestant nobility. Every aspect of Protestantism—justification by faith alone, exaltation of the Lord’s Supper, the propriety of clerical marriage—was condemned in a stream of bulls. Nevertheless the rebel faiths continued to prosper. In 1530 Charles V, at the insistence of the Curia, signed a decree directing the Imperial Chamber of Justice (Reichskammergericht) to take legal action against princes who had appropriated ecclesiastical property. They were given six months’ grace to comply. None did.

The Spanish Inquisition is notorious, but the Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign of terror. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny. As a consequence, the advocates of reform, who had proposed the only measures which might have healed the split in Christendom, fell under the dark shadow of the hereticators’ suspicion. No Catholic was too powerful to elude their judgment. The progressive minister of Naples, disgusted with the venal Neapolitan church court, began trying indicted ecclesiastics in the city’s civil court. For thus violating the privilegium fori, he was summarily excommunicated. The liberal Giovanni Cardinal Morone was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of unorthodoxy. Another cardinal, who had actually reconverted lapsed Catholics, ran afoul of the Vatican by attempting to prevent war between the Habsburgs and France. He was recalled to Rome, accused of heresy, and ruined. The archbishop of Toledo, because he had openly expressed admiration of Erasmus, was sentenced to seventeen years in a dungeon, and after the death of Clement VII another Erasmian—Pietro Carnesecchi, who had been the pope’s secretary—was cremated in a Roman auto-da-fé.

In the opinion of the Apostolic See, most Catholic rulers, including the Holy Roman emperor, were far too tolerant of heresy. Francis I was particularly disappointing, and the Vatican was delighted when, after his death at Fontainebleau in 1547, he was succeeded by the devout and murderous Henry II, at whose side lay the even more homicidal Diane de Poitiers, royal mistress and enthusiastic Inquisiteuse. Together they planned a grand strategy to crush all French apostates. The printing, sale, or even the possession of Protestant literature was a felony; advocacy of heretical ideas was a capital offense; and informers were encouraged by assigning them, after convictions, one-third of the condemneds’ goods. Trials were conducted by a special commission, whose court came to be known as le chambre ardente, the burning room. In less than three years the commission sentenced sixty Frenchmen to the stake. Anne du Bourg, a university rector and a member of the Paris Parlement, suggested that executions be postponed until the Council of Trent defined Catholic orthodoxy. Henry had him arrested. He meant to see him burn, too, but destiny—the Protestants naturally said it was God —intervened. The king was killed in a tournament in 1559. His queen, his mistress, and the Vicar of Christ mourned him. Du Bourg, of course, did not, though he went to his death anyway as a martyr luthérien.

HENRY II OF France had been admired, applauded, and blessed in St. Peter’s, but in the twelve years following the rise of Luther the sovereign most cherished in Rome was Henry VIII of England. Henry seemed, indeed, the answer to a Holy Father’s prayers. The fact that his handsome features, golden beard, and athletic build also made him the answer to maidenly and unmaidenly prayers appeared to be irrelevant; the Apostolic See was in no position to condemn royal lechery. More important, before the death of his elder brother made him heir to his father’s throne, he had been trained to be a priest.

By the time he mounted the throne, in 1509, he could and did quote Scripture to any purpose, and after the monk of Wittenberg had posted his Ninety-five Theses on the Castle Church door, Henry had denounced him in his Assertio septem sacramentorum contra M. Lutherum, a vigorous defense of the Catholic sacraments, probably ghostwritten by Richard Pace, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, or, possibly, Erasmus. In it he asked, “What serpent so venomous as he who calls the pope’s authority tyrannous?” and declared that no punishment could be too vile for anyone who “will not obey the Chief Priest and Supreme Judge on earth … Christ’s only vicar, the pope of Rome.”

Luther, replying with his typical grace, referred to his critic as that “lubberly ass,” that “frantic madman … that King of Lies, King Heinz, by God’s disgrace King of England,” and continued: “Since with malice aforethought that damnable and rotten worm has lied against my King in heaven, it is right for me to bespatter this English monarch with his own filth.” He then sponsored a Protestant conspiracy in the heart of London, the Association of Christian Brothers. The association circulated anti-Catholic tracts and reached its climax the year before Rome’s sack with the publication of William Tyndale’s famous — infamous in the Vatican—English translation of the New Testament, which made the thirty-four-year-old British clergyman an archenemy, not only of the Apostolic See, but also of his then-Catholic sovereign.

Tyndale was a humanist, and his tale is an example of the deepening hostility between men of God and men of learning. English humanists had rejoiced at Henry’s coronation. Lord Mountjoy had written Erasmus of the “affection [the king] bears to the learned.” Sir Thomas More said of the new monarch that he had “more learning than any English monarch ever possessed before him,” and asked, “What may we not expect from a king who has been nourished by philosophy and the nine muses?” Henry’s invitation to Erasmus, urging him to leave Rome and settle in England, appeared to confirm the enthusiasm of English scholars. It seemed inconceivable that the popular monarch, faced with a choice between faith and reason, should choose faith.

But Erasmus, after accepting the invitation, found that the king had no time for him. And as the religious revolution grew in ferocity, Henry’s commitment to Catholicism deepened. Lord Chancellor More, with royal encouragement, imprisoned the Christian Brothers and other heretics. And the Tyndale affair, which appalled English intellectuals, seemed to align him with the most reactionary heresimachs.

William Tyndale had conceived his translation while reading ancient languages at Oxford and Cambridge, and he had begun work upon it shortly after his ordination as a priest in 1521, the year of Luther’s condemnation at Worms. A Catholic friend reproached him: “It would be better to be without God’s law than the pope’s.” Tyndale replied: “If God spare me, ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than you do.”

Had he valued his own years on earth, he would have heeded his friend. It was one thing for Erasmus to publish parallel texts of the Gospels in Latin and Greek; few, after all, could read them. This was another matter altogether. It was actually dangerous; the Church didn’t want—didn’t permit—wide readership of the New Testament. Studying it was a privilege they had reserved for the hierarchy, which could then interpret passages to support the sophistry, and often the secular politics, of the Holy See.

Tyndale had been warned that finding a printer for his completed manuscript would be difficult. Luckless in England, he crossed the Channel and found a publisher in Catholic Cologne. The text had been set and was on the stone when a local dean heard of it, grasped the implications, and persuaded authorities in Cologne to pi the type. Fleeing with his manuscript, Tyndale found that he was now a police figure; had post offices existed, his picture would have been posted in them. The Frankfurt dean sent word of his criminal attempt to Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry, who declared Tyndale a felon. Sentries were posted at all English ports, under orders to seize him upon his return home.

But the fugitive was less interested in his personal freedom than in seeing his work in print. He therefore journeyed to Protestant Worms, where, in 1525, Peter Schöffer published an octavo edition of his work. Six thousand copies had been shipped to England when Tyndale was again spotted. He was on the run for the next four years. Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had underestimated the gravity of his offense and the persistence of his sovereign. British agents had never ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry’s insistence he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels, tried for heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted. His corpse was burned at the stake, an admonition for any who might have been tempted by his folly.

The royal warning was unheeded. You can’t kill a good book, including the Good Book, and Tyndale’s translation was excellent; later it became the basis for the King James version. Despite a lengthy Dialogue by More, denouncing the translation as flawed, copies of the Worms edition had been smuggled into the country and were being passed from hand to hand. To the bishop of London this was an intolerable, metastasizing heresy. He bought up all that were for sale and publicly burned them at St. Paul’s Cross. But the archbishop of Canterbury was dissatisfied; his spies told him that many remained in private hands. Protestant peers with country houses were loaning them out, like public libraries. Assembling his bishops, the archbishop declared that tracking them down was essential—each was placing souls in jeopardy—and so, on his instructions, dioceses organized posses, searching the homes of known literates, and offered rewards to informers — sending out the alarm to keep Christ’s revealed word from those who worshiped him.

Henry’s blows against Lutheranism and English heresy were appreciated in Rome. The king had expected them to be, and had

King Henry VIII of England (1491–1547)

let Rome know that he would welcome a quid pro quo. Earlier pontiffs had designated the rulers of Spain as “Catholic Sovereigns” and French monarchs as “Most Christian.” Henry wanted something along that line, and Pope Leo gave it to him, bestowing upon him and his successors the title Defensor Fidei, Defender of the Faith. Henry ordered this struck on all English coins, and because kings rarely return anything once it is in their grasp, the rulers of England have kept the honorific ever since, ^* though within a dozen years of its conferral the Holy See very much wanted it back.

IN THE POPULAR imagination, Henry VIII and Martin Luther have been yoked as leaders of the Reformation, though each would have deeply resented the coupling, and in fact they do not belong together. Luther was a theological rebel. Henry remained a faithful Catholic in every particular except one. He rejected the supremacy of Rome because the pontiff—for political, not religious reasons —resisted what the king regarded a royal prerogative. There is much to be said in Henry’s behalf and very little in the pope’s, but the motives of both have been muddied, as often happens when romance rears its violin-shaped head.

The immediate issue was Henry’s decision in 1527 to dissolve his eighteen-year-old marriage to Queen Catherine, Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. His motive would not be acceptable to later ages, but it was then. Medieval sovereigns were expected to function as national stallions, providing heirs for their thrones. This was particularly important in Henry’s case. The dreary, thirty-one-year War of the Roses between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians had ended only six years before his birth, and his family’s claim to the monarchy was shaky; if he died without male issue, England would almost certainly be ravaged by civil war again.

Unfortunately Catherine, now forty-two, had proved an incompetent conceiver of healthy boys. Her only child to survive infancy was a girl. Henry knew the problem did not lie with him. In 1519 he had sired a bastard boy by his first royal mistress, Elizabeth Blount, the sister of William Blount—Lord Mountjoy, Erasmus’s patron. Though adulterous, this and Henry’s other affairs were sanctioned by custom; unwritten law held that when royal marriages had been contracted for reasons of state, either party might seek diversion elsewhere. But there was another consideration. Assuming that his queen would bear children of both sexes, the king had betrothed their small daughter, Mary, to the dauphin of France. Should Henry die without leaving a son, Mary would inherit the English throne, and when her husband was crowned king of France, the British island would, in effect, become a province of France.

The annulment he sought required Rome’s consent, but that should have presented no problem. Papal dispensations were not uncommon; the usual procedure was to find some flaw in a marriage which would permit an annulment or a divorce. In Henry’s case the flaw was genuine. Catherine was the widow of his older brother Arthur, and English canon law prohibited such a marriage, taking its precedent from the book of Leviticus (20:21): “If a man shall take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless.” The Vatican had provided a dispensation permitting Henry to wed her, but it was doubtful that the pontiff had possessed the power to overrule the scriptural ban, particularly since the queen’s fruitlessness seemed to have fulfilled its prophecy. The king said that the dispensation, and therefore his union with Catherine, had been illegal. Theologians on both sides of the Channel agreed with him.

In Rome, however, the prospect of an English royal divorce bore distasteful political implications. Pope Clement was struggling to recover from the sack of the holy city, where, largely as a result of his own blundering, his situation had become highly complicated. If the pontiff agreed, he could anticipate a highly unpleasant confrontation with a ruler even more powerful than Henry: the Holy Roman emperor, whose domains sprawled across the Continent, and whose armies had now twice defeated the French in disputes over Milan, Burgundy, Naples, and Navarre. The undisputed master of Italy, Charles V literally surrounded the Vatican and therefore was, in proximity alone, bound to intimidate any pontiff, particularly at a time when the papacy was deeply involved in regal intrigues. Clement was a captive pope, and the emperor’s views would be given great weight, especially if they were strongly held.

In this case they were. Charles’s childhood tutor, the future Pope Adrian, had instilled in him a solemn reverence for the Vicar of Christ. Catherine was his aunt, and he was incensed by the argument—unwisely presented to the Vatican by Henry’s legate—that because she had been Arthur’s widow, her marriage was not only invalid but actually incestuous. Should the Vatican accept this reasoning, she would be reduced to the level of a discarded concubine, and her daughter, Mary, England’s heir apparent, Charles’s cousin, would become illegitimate. If Clement denied papal permission, Henry would be blocked—unless, of course, he quit the Church, a possibility which seems to have occurred to no one except him until he had publicly committed himself. It came as a shock to prominent English Catholics, confronting them with an agonizing choice between their faith and their monarch. No one who knew Henry expected royal sympathy for their dilemma, and there was none; when the humanist Juan Luis Vives spoke up for Catherine, he was dismissed as Mary Tudor’s teacher and banished from the court.

None of Henry’s predecessors would have dreamed of breaking with Rome, but he was a man of immense determination, and his resolve was strengthened by his choice of, and infatuation with, Catherine’s successor: Anne Boleyn, a nobly born nineteen-year-old girl remarkable for her flashing eyes, long, flowing hair, and vivacity. Here his judgment was gravely flawed. Superficially, Anne seemed qualified for the throne. The daughter of a viscount and granddaughter of a duke, she had been educated at a Paris finishing school and had served as lady-in-waiting, first to Marguerite of Navarre and then, back in England, to Catherine. She was witty and gay. But she was also flighty, self-centered, and, by all accounts, lascivious.

It was her sexuality which had attracted Henry to her. The Boleyn women were noted for their libidos; both Anne’s mother and her older sister had slipped naked into the king’s bed, to his subsequent delight, but her lovemaking skills eclipsed theirs. To him this wanton girl seemed built to breed. He was convinced that once the Holy See had sanctioned a royal annulment, freeing him to wed her, crown her, and impregnate her with a scion, England would be guaranteed a future sovereign to rule an England at peace. What he did not know—then—was that despite her youth she was as experienced as he was. Before she seduced him, her many lovers had included the poet Thomas Wyatt and Henry Percy, the future Earl of Northumberland. Even in what one historian of Hampton Court describes as “exceedingly corrupt court revels,” she was notoriously available to both single and married courtiers. Indeed, there is evidence that when the king designated her his queen-elect, she and Percy were already secretly married.

Because of this—and much more of the same, which was to follow—the king’s decision to abandon Catherine led to the messiest divorce in history. Yet had Anne Boleyn never existed, Henry would still have found a new queen. He had begun to consider changing wives as early as 1514, when Anne was a child of seven; when he quit Catherine’s bed in 1524, it was to sleep with Mary Boleyn, not her younger sister. Three more years passed before he took Anne as his mistress and made the first, tentative inquiries about a dispensation from Rome.

His hopes were vested in his lord chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey sympathized with the king’s yearning for a son and had his own candidate for the succession, the French princess Renée, daughter of King Louis XII. Privately the cardinal was appalled by Anne. He was familiar with her reputation, and by now the king must have heard at least a whisper of it. But to a monarch with Henry’s pride it would have been inconceivable that any queen of his would be tempted—let alone dare—to contemplate infidelities. Furthermore, by now he was in love with her.

Wolsey badly needed a success. Once considered invincible, the lord high chancellor was now seen as a leader of lost causes. His wars had alienated the Commons and the merchants, his dictatorial manner had offended the clergy, and his foreign policy —rejecting Charles V for a French alliance—had proved disastrous. Had he been wise, he would have been unobtrusive. Yet he could not hide his lack of enthusiasm for what the royal court was calling “the king’s great matter.” Henry, impatient, bypassed the cardinal and sent his own secretary, William Knight, to Rome. Knight, speaking for his sovereign, submitted his case to Pope Clement. The pontiff, he argued, should declare Henry’s present marriage invalid. In any event, he proposed, the matter should be decided in England. His Holiness agreed. Knight then suggested that an eminent prelate serve as judge and make the final ruling. He had Wolsey in mind. The pontiff knew it. He also knew that for seven months of the previous year he and his retinue had been holed up in Sant’ Angelo while Rome was sacked. The troops still surrounded the city, and their commander was the English queen’s

Anne Boleyn (1507–1536)

nephew. If Clement yielded to Knight’s other point, he would be inviting the wrath of Charles V. Yet he could not leave the English cardinal out. Therefore, Clement ruled that two members of the sacred college should preside. Wolsey would be joined by an Italian cardinal, Lorenzo Campeggio. This was a stunning loss of face for Wolsey, and when Anne turned against him he was a ruined man. Henry seized his palace at Whitehall and stripped him of his secular offices. He was allowed to retain the archbishopric of York. After a year the king ordered his arrest. Ill, Wolsey died on the way to London.

In the meantime, Cardinal Campeggio had found the English sovereign immovable. “This passion,” he wrote the pope, “is the most extraordinary thing. He sees nothing, he thinks of nothing but his Anne; he cannot be without her for an hour.” Nevertheless Henry, willful but astute, had been proceeding shrewdly. He had appointed a commission to gather legal opinions from Catholic scholars all over Europe, and confronted the pontiff’s representative with the fact that they backed him, without exception. Campeggio agreed that England deserved a fertile queen. He urged Catherine to retire to a nunnery. She agreed—provided Henry enter a monastery. The cardinal was offended. He knew she could not be serious; the thought of Henry VIII resigning himself to obedience, chastity, and poverty was absurd. What the cardinal did not realize was that Catherine’s intractability, supported by her imperial nephew and his captive pope, meant that from this point forward the likelihood of England’s defection from Catholicism would increase month by month.

HENRY IS OFTEN depicted as short-tempered, a man who was determined to have his way whatever the consequences. The determination was there, but in pursuing his desires he also showed remarkable patience. His reply to Luther—the work of a staunch Catholic sovereign —was written in 1521. In 1522 Anne Boleyn, aged fifteen, became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, and it was there that she caught the king’s eye. He had already despaired of Catherine’s infertility, but five years passed before he secretly began to seek to annul their marriage. For six years the pope, under pressure from her nephew Charles, ignored Henry’s appeals.

It was in 1533 that he married Anne, now twenty-six, and was excommunicated by the pope. Parliament passed the Act of Succession in 1534; it declared the king’s marriage to Catherine invalid, recognized Anne as the new queen, made questioning her marriage to Henry a capital crime, and required all Henry’s subjects to take an oath of loyalty to him. Nor was the tale told. The king’s disillusionment with Anne, among other consequences, lay ahead.

In the beginning the king had assumed that the pope would swiftly grant his request, dissolving his barren marriage. All precedents were on his side. Even Campeggio, who first came to London in 1528, agreed with him. But the pope, to Henry’s growing frustration, seemed incapable of making up his mind. Campeggio knew how little weight an Italian cardinal carried in London. If he ruled in Catherine’s favor, he would simply be banished. Therefore he appealed for instructions from the Vatican. Clement’s frantic reply reflects his helplessness. He told his cardinal “not to pronounce sentence without express commission hence. … If so great an injury be done to the Emperor, all hope is lost of universal peace, and the Church cannot escape utter ruin, as it is entirely in the power of the Emperor’s servants. … Delay as much as possible.” By this and other byzantine maneuvers the pope bought time—five more years of it.

Eventually there was no time left to buy. Anticipating a dispensation, the king had fitted up splendid apartments for Anne adjacent to his own at Greenwich; courtiers reported to her, as though she had already been crowned; crowds gathered outside her windows, ignoring Catherine. Often Henry would not leave Greenwich until noon. But papal politics made this bedfellowship perilous. The issue became critical when Anne discovered that she was with child. Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge theologian, had drawn up a new array of arguments; a team of negotiators, now hastily dispatched by the king, presented them in Rome. Still the pontiff hesitated. Anne was beginning to show, and no infant could succeed to the monarchy unless born to a queen.

Henry could wait no longer. He appointed Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury, invested him with extraordinary powers, and urged him to place the broadest possible interpretation on his new office. The new prelate moved swiftly, ruling that the pope was incompetent to grant a dispensation. He declared Catherine a divorcée, secretly married Henry to his mistress, and in May 1533, on Whitsunday of her twenty-seventh year, when she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, crowned her with great ceremony in Westminster Hall.

Nothing could stop the split in the Church now. The king’s blood was up. He had already summoned a special session of Parliament. Working on the anticlerical feelings of the MPs—and despite the opposition of Sir Thomas More, his new high chancellor — he had rammed through a brutal legislative program limiting the powers of the clergy, increasing taxes on the Church, and cutting the annates paid to Rome to 5 percent. This last act was the sort of insubordination which deeply wounded the Holy See. Clement had dawdled for years over the divorce petition from London, but he had also drafted a bull excommunicating the king. Now the Vatican executed it.

The king’s response was just as vehement. Following his lead, Parliament passed thirty-two religious bills, which, among other things, cut off all revenues to Rome, and confiscated all Church lands—by a conservative Catholic estimate, 20 percent of the land in England. Other measures suppressed monasteries, decreed that spiritual appeals by English Christians must be made to Canterbury or the king, required new clergymen to swear loyalty to the crown before they could be consecrated, and stipulated that only royal nominees could become bishops and archbishops. Then Henry took the ultimate step. In the Act of Supremacy (November 1534) he abandoned Rome completely, founding a new national church, Ecclesia Anglicana, and appointing himself and his successors its supreme head.

Sir Thomas More, Wolsey’s successor as high chancellor, had followed Henry for a time, but he had been in agony, trapped between conflicting loyalties. More was the king’s humble servant. However, he was also a devout Catholic. The less his sovereign saw of him, he reasoned, the better. Therefore he resigned the chancellorship in 1532. It was in vain. He could not hide; he was too eminent; the king was watching him closely. His personal crisis reached a climax in the spring of 1534. When the king demanded that his subjects take an oath to obey the Act of Succession, he was asking more than More could give. It meant swearing fealty to Henry and repudiating the papacy. Most of the English clergy meekly obeyed. More didn’t protest; he simply remained mute. He condemned neither the oath nor those who had taken it, but though remaining loyal to the crown in word and deed, he refused to renounce Rome—a devastating silence, because Henry was taking an enormous risk. Although he was a powerful monarch, his reign was confined to the living. England’s rising national spirit supported him, as Germany’s had supported Luther, but if the pope excommunicated his entire kingdom, condemning every Englishman to eternal flames, the possibility of an uprising would be far from remote. In this exigency the king could not hesitate.

More had already opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne and refused to attend her coronation, a mortal insult. Any tolerance of further lèse majesté by Henry would be interpreted as weakness, especially since the former chancellor, garlanded with royal honors, was the most influential man in English public life. The king could be merciless or he could forfeit his crown, and for this king that was no choice. More was charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

At his trial More finally spoke out. Splitting the Church was a tragic crime, he said; he could not, in all conscience, be an accomplice to it. Nor, he added, could he bring himself to believe that “any temporal man could be the head of the spirituality.” He was one of the most eloquent men of his generation, but he spoke in a hubbub and could scarcely be heard. The hearing was a formality. The verdict had already been decided. His judges included Anne’s father, her uncle, and her brother, Lord Rochford. They condemned him to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered”—the extreme penalty for betrayal of the sovereign. It meant that the chancellor’s shrunken cadaver, cut into four parts, would be left to rot on the London docks.

That was too much for the king. As Anne sulked—Sir Thomas had succeeded Wolsey as the object of her malice—Henry changed the sentence to simple beheading. The scholar who had served him so faithfully went to the ax with his head high. As he mounted the scaffold it trembled and seemed about to collapse. Turning to a king’s officer he said calmly, “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” Then, altering the ghastly ritual by blindfolding himself, he asked the hushed crowd to witness his death “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, being the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” He died. Afterward his head was affixed to London Bridge.

England was shocked. No one in the kingdom believed the former lord chancellor even capable of betraying crown and country. Erasmus mourned his friend, “whose soul was more pure than any snow, whose genius was such that England never had and never again will have its like.” The Vatican proclaimed him a Christian martyr. In time the papacy beatified and then canonized him.

LESS THAN A YEAR later Anne Boleyn followed him to the block. Her thousand-day reign had been a disaster, so calamitous that the prestige of the papacy was enhanced; only divine intervention, men reasoned, could have visited such punishment upon the rebel monarch in London. His conviction that she would present him with an heir had been wrong. Her first baby, like Catherine’s, was female. No one could blame her for that, but the failure of her womb was the least of it. Once on the throne she seemed to change personality. Her gaiety vanished and was replaced by temper tantrums, sharp-tongued imperiousness, and innumerable petty demands which left the king exasperated. Catherine at least had been gentle, and he began to miss that; when she died, he wept, and ordered the court to go into mourning. Anne refused. After she presented him with a second, dead child—a boy, born prematurely and badly deformed—he no longer desired her. He told friends Anne had bewitched him, and cited the baby’s deformities as evidence of her sorcery. To her fury, he began sliding his hand under the skirts of one of her maids, the nobly born Jane Seymour. ^*

If the evidence later arrayed against her is to be believed, Anne was the last wife in England entitled to protest her husband’s dalliance. According to sworn testimony, she had scarcely recovered from her daughter’s birth when she began taking lovers, and her intrigues continued through her three-year marriage. If a youth aroused her desire, witnesses declared, she would invite him to her bedchamber by dropping a handkerchief at his feet; if he picked it up and wiped his face, her proposition had been accepted, and her personal maid would be alerted to his arrival that evening at midnight.

These charges may have been trumped up—later it was said that several of the men accused of sleeping with the queen were homosexuals—but this was not apparent at the time. Henry, according to the record, learned that he was being cuckolded. Told of the handkerchief signal, he watched it happen, moved in that night with armed yeomen, and struck hard. The new lord chancellor took Anne to the Tower and read out the charges against her. She fell to her knees, sobbing and protesting her innocence.

In the preliminary hearing three knighted gentlemen of the privy chamber and a court musician confessed to “criminal intercourse with the queen.” Then the earl of Northumberland, as he now was, testified that he, too, had been intimate with her. The greatest sensation came at the end, when Lord Rochford, Anne’s brother—who had found Sir Thomas More guilty—was led into the dock and accused of coupling with his own sister, a charge supported, by what is said to have been convincing evidence, by Rochford’s wife. Tried by a jury which included Anne’s father, the musician pleaded guilty and, as a commoner, was merely hanged. The knights then were beheaded.

Three days later, twenty-six peers, chaired by Anne’s uncle, the duke of Norfolk, sat in judgment of her and her brother. Both were found guilty of adultery and incest and condemned to death by their uncle. Violent death being commonplace and a life hereafter assumed, the condemned in that age often accepted their fate with an insouciance which would be astonishing today. After praying that she be forgiven her crimes, Anne, still only twenty-nine, asked that her head be struck off as soon as possible. She remarked wryly that she drew comfort from the thought that “the executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck,” then laughed. On the scaffold she asked the crowd to pray for the king: “A gentler and more merciful prince there never was, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord.” She and Rochford were decapitated within a few minutes of each other, the queen, by precedence of rank, meeting the blade first.

This extraordinary cataract of events, precipitated by a king’s yearning for a male heir, led, ironically, to two royal heiresses, each of whom reigned memorably. Catherine’s daughter, Mary, survived her mother’s humiliation and briefly visited a terrible retribution upon those she held responsible for it. The fears of Charles V were at first realized; after the divorce Mary was declared illegitimate. Later, however, after the birth of a male heir to Henry—the future Edward VI, his son by Jane Seymour—Parliament relented, passing a complex act which, among other things, restored Catherine’s daughter to the royal line of succession and permitted her to occupy the throne for five years, beginning in 1553, as Queen Mary I.

Mary was not a beloved sovereign, nor did she mean to be. Popularity was not among her priorities. Juan Luis Vives had done his work well; she had never renounced her Roman Catholicism, nor—understandably—had she forgiven the zealous new Protestants who had refused to let her visit her mother, even when Catherine had lain on her deathbed. As sovereign she swore to turn back the clock, wiping out the Reformation. It was impossible, but she tried very hard. As her chief adviser she appointed Reginald Cardinal Pole, an English cardinal who had remained loyal to Rome, and whom the pope designated as Mary’s papal legate. Pole shared her bitterness. He had quarreled with Henry over the divorce and predicted, in the king’s presence, that he would be consigned to hell.

That had been lèse majesté with a vengeance, and it had been swiftly punished. The angry sovereign had set a price on Pole’s head; the cardinal had fled for his life, eluding capture but suffering nevertheless, for during his fugitive years both his mother and brother were beheaded. Now, at his urging, Mary made her attempt to restore papal supremacy over England. The penal laws against heresy were revived. On her orders, Archbishop Cranmer was burned at the stake—other famous martyrs were Bishops Ridley and Latimer—and Pole was then consecrated in Canterbury as Cranmer’s successor. Over three hundred Englishmen, whose only crime had been following Mary’s father out of the Roman Church, were also executed. Perhaps her most significant achievement, which she shared with Henry, was her demonstration that England could be just as barbaric as the rest of sixteenth-century Europe. Even today she is remembered as Bloody Mary.

THE IMMORTAL Maid of Orleans still dominated memories of the prior century. But now the sixteenth was more than half gone and it had produced no woman to match her; indeed, no heroines at all. Then, late in its sixth decade, irony intervened to produce a woman who would rank with the greatest sovereigns in English history, giving her name to a new age which would redeem the squalor of the old. She was the daughter of the disgraced Anne Boleyn, who had lain in Anne’s womb, awaiting birth, during the coronation Sir Thomas More had ignored. On the day of her birth, she had been declared illegitimate by the Vatican. In the wake of her mother’s execution the archbishop of Canterbury—after ruling that Anne had, in fact, been married to Percy at the time of her royal wedding and had thus been bigamous as well as adulterous and incestuous—had concurred with Rome, pronouncing the child a bastard.

Anne having been formally declared a common slut—thus placing her far beneath Catherine, whose status as a divorcée was relatively respectable—the royal solicitors concluded that Henry’s second marriage had had no legal status whatever. Since it had never occurred, the three-year-old waif who had been its only issue had no legal existence. Like her half-sister, however, and indeed because of her, Anne’s daughter was to be rescued from oblivion. The restoration of Mary’s legitimacy created a precedent. After Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth, Parliament, bowing to Henry’s will, recognized all three of his children, conceived in various wombs, thus establishing the final order of Tudor succession: first Edward, son of Jane; then Mary, daughter of Catherine; and finally, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne.

Crowned in 1558 at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism, revived her father’s Act of Supremacy, and reigned over England for forty-five glorious years. In light of the tragic consequences of her parents’ sexual excesses, which had typified European nobility in their time—the promiscuity, the proliferation of bastards, the hasty coupling in palace antechambers—she was perhaps wise to live out her long life unaccompanied by a connubial consort, and to be remembered in history as the Virgin Queen.