by Eamon Duffy
In the same year in which Erasmus published Julius Exclusus, in which the Lateran Council ended, and in which Pope Leo packed the College of Cardinals with thirty-one new creations, an unknown theology professor in Wittenberg, an obscure new German university, proposed an academic debate on the subject of indulgences. His name was Martin Luther, and he was reacting against the indulgence which Pope Julius and after him Pope Leo had issued to help fund the rebuilding of St Peters. Raising donations for Church projects by dispensing spiritual blessings was a long-established practice, and few people questioned it. The preaching of this indulgence, however, was riddled with corruption. In Luther’s part of Germany the profits were being shared between the Pope and Prince Albrecht of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Magdeburg, a twenty-three-year-old who had recendy also bought the archbishopric of Mainz, and was using proceeds from the Indulgence to pay off the bribes and loans this had involved. The chief publicist for the Indulgence, the Dominican preacher Tetzel, was eager to rake in contributions, and was none too subtle about what he promised in return. The Indulgence, he claimed, would release loved ones from their sufferings in purgatory: he even set the promise to a German rhyme which roughly translates as:
Place your penny on the drum,
The pearly gates open and in strolls mum.
Devout minds everywhere were revolted by this sort of stuff, and there had been many protests before about such abuse of indulgences. But Luther was not protesting about the abuse of indulgences: he was protesting about indulgences themselves. Luther was a pious and scrupulous monk, who had recently passed through a profound spiritual crisis. Overwhelmed by a sense of his own sinfulness, he had found the idea of God’s justice terrifying, and the Church’s remedies through confession and acts of penance powerless to calm his fears. Release had come from a phrase in St Paul: ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ For Luther, this one phrase turned the whole medieval system of salvation on its head. The saint was not, as the Church taught, a man or woman who no longer sinned: the saint was a sinner who put all his or her trust in God. Good works, penance, indulgences, contributed nothing to salvation. Faith, a childlike dependence on God, was everything. There was a place for good works in the Christian life, but as a thankful response for salvation achieved, not as a means of earning it. A phrase from one of Luther’s lectures on Romans puts the matter in a nutshell. The Christian was ‘always a sinner, always a penitent, always right with God’.
For Luther, then, the St Peter’s Indulgence was a cruel and blasphemous con-trick, taking money for empty promises. He denounced it as a pious racket, and his protest was taken up on every side. This was the age of the printing revolution. For the first time a technology existed which could spread ideas rapidly across the whole of Europe, which could take theology out of the monastic cloister or the university lecture-room into the market place. Within a matter of months Luther was the most famous man in Germany. As the Church authorities moved against him, he abandoned the Indulgence issue and launched an attack on the whole range of Catholic teaching and practice. If faith was everything, and faith came from the Word preached and the scriptures read, then reliance on priests, sacraments, hierarchy, was all in vain.
These ideas spread through Germany like wildfire. Luther taught the priesthood of all believers, the right of the simple men and women of Germany to test for themselves the truth of what they were told by reading the Bible, which he proceeded to translate into German. To the poor, this seemed like a call to liberation from all that oppressed and impoverished them. It was a time of hunger and great social tension. In 1525 the peasantry of Germany rose against their masters, and many of them had slogans from Luther’s writings written on their banners. Luther hastily disowned these revolutionary readings of his message, but for the rich and powerful, too, his message had its charms. Luther’s denunciation of the racketeering of the medieval Church, his rejection of the monastic life as pointless and anti-Christian, meant that Church property was theft. Got by fraud, by right it belonged to the state. Luther called on the rulers of Germany to protect the Gospel. They responded by helping themselves to the property of the Church. His message was a stone thrown into a calm pond: the ripples spread and spread.
In Rome, Leo X failed utterly to grasp the seriousness of the crisis, the need for drastic action to hold the Church together and to meet the legitimate demands of the reformers. The sophisticated Roman and Florentine worlds of classical learning and artistic patronage, the convoluted game of Italian dynastic politics in which the papacy must be a player if it was to survive at all, simply had not equipped him to appreciate the more immediate and existential anxieties of the earnest north of Europe.
Leo tried at first to have Luther silenced by the authorities of his religious order, the Augustinians. When that failed, he tried to remove the political protection being extended to Luther by the local Prince, Frederick of Saxony. Finally, in June 1520, he issued a bull, Exsurge Domine, condemning Luther’s teaching on forty-one separate counts. Luther responded by publicly burning the bull, adding that ‘this burning is only a trifle. It is necessary that the Pope and Papal See should also be burned. He who does not resist the papacy with all his heart cannot obtain eternal salvation.’ He was solemnly excommunicated, and took no notice whatever. A similar defiance of Alexander VI, a far worse pope than Leo, had undone Savonarola in 1498. Times had changed, however, and German hostility towards the papacy was of a different order from anything Italy knew.
For more than a century there had been a strong anti-Roman tradition in Germany, fuelled by memories of the struggle of Frederick Barbarossa with the twelfth-century papacy, by the ideas of the Conciliar movement, by the example of the Hussite schism in Bohemia, and by the financial and jurisdictional demands of the papacy in Germany. Luther and his supporters harnessed and exploited this groundswell of resentment, and reformation pictorial propaganda brilliantly homed in on images of a voracious and corrupt papacy – popes excreted from the anus of the devil, popes recrucifying Christ, popes as the seven-headed beast of the Book of Revelation, each head crowned with the papal tiara.
Leo’s sudden death on 1 December 1521 left the papacy directionless and bankrupt. A strong faction among the cardinals wanted Leo’s able nephew, Giulio de’ Medici. Others, equally determined to exclude the Medici, were divided by fears of imperial or French influence in Italy. Out of the confusion emerged a surprise choice, a carpenter’s son from the Netherlands, former tutor to the Emperor Charles V, Governor of the Netherlands and Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Hadrian of Utrecht. Hadrian had not even been present at the Conclave, being absent in Spain. He was chosen to break the deadlock because no one knew anything against him, and at sixty-three years old he was unlikely to be pope for long.
The election of Hadrian VI (1522–3) created consternation. Charles V, confident that he now had a tame pope, was delighted. Francis I, for the same reason, was appalled. The Romans were aghast at the idea of a northern barbarian pope with a reputation for personal austerity verging on puritanism. His arrival confirmed these fears. He made it clear there would be none of the customary bonanza of papal favours, and instituted a programme of drastic economies which included a swingeing reduction of personnel in the Curia. He announced his intention of abolishing many of the offices invented and sold by his predecessors. An old-fashioned scholastic theologian (Erasmus had attended his lectures) he cared nothing for the Renaissance. The Vatican collection of classical sculpture was dismissed as so many ‘heathen idols’, Raphael’s pupils were sent packing and the decoration of the Vatican apartments halted, and he also stopped the Construction of the triumphal arches being put up by the city to welcome him, on the ground that they were pagan.
Hadrian was a devout man, and a reformer. He caused astonishment by celebrating Mass every day, something no pope in living memory – perhaps no Pope ever – had done before. He had witnessed and taken part in the movements towards reform – biblical studies, clerical education, improved preachi
ng – which Erasmian Humanism was inspiring in Spain and northern Europe. Unlike Leo, he was also intensely aware of the need to tackle the religious turmoil in Germany. In November 1522 he despatched a legate to the German Diet of Nuremberg. In the Pope’s name, the Legate acknowledged before the Diet that the evils in the Church had spread downwards from the papacy, and he announced Hadrian’s intention of a thorough reform of the Roman Curia and the hierarchy generally. The limitations of Hadrian’s vision, however, came in what he had to say about Luther. This ‘petty monk’ was a rebel against Catholic tradition. If he acknowledged his fault, he would be received back as an errant son. Otherwise the Diet must take severe measures to suppress him and his teaching – amputation was sometimes the only means to remove gangrene from a body.
There was a strong element of unreality about all this. Though Hadrian had received detailed accounts of the wildfire spread of Lutheran support in Germany, he responded as the Grand Inquisitor of an authoritarian state like Spain might have been expected to respond, with a mixture of stern admonition and threats of reprisals. Luthers protest had touched a nerve too sensitive to be anaesthetised by curial reform, however extensive, and the threat of ecclesiastical repression was pointless when it was unenforceable. Nothing in Hadrian’s response suggests any grasp of the real power of Luther’s message, the evangelical fervour and the sense of the radical and blessed simplification of religious life which it offered.
Hadrian died in September 1523, a disappointed man. Despite his close relationship with Charles V, he had struggled to keep the papacy neutral between France and the empire. He was a clumsy politician, however, and France’s refusal to co-operate in a Crusade and a threatened invasion of Lombardy had in the end forced him into an alliance with Charles. His longing for a Crusade against the Turks, who had taken Belgrade in 1521 and threatened to overwhelm Hungary, came to nothing, and in December 1522 Rhodes fell to Turkish forces. His attempts to cleanse the Curia resulted in an indiscriminate clear-out which included crucial administrators. Papal business ground to a halt, and the inexperienced Pope wavered over urgent decisions, for lack of expert guidance. When he died Rome erupted in joy, and Europe heaved a collective sigh of relief. The late Pope, it was said, would have made a splendid monk. His tomb inscription quoted a bitter saying of his – ‘How much depends on the times in which even the best of men are cast.’ It was to be four and a half centuries before the cardinals took the risk of electing another non-Italian pope.
Hadrian’s successor, Giulio de’ Medici, Clement VII (1523–34) could not have been a greater contrast. He was a Renaissance aristocrat, the bastard son of Guiliano de’ Medici. Acknowledged as his grandson by Lorenzo the Magnificent, he had been made a cardinal in 1513, and in due course had become his uncle Leo X’s closest and best adviser. At the time of his election, Clement was universally respected. He was immensely hard-working and efficient, pious in a conventional way, free of sexual scandal. A connoisseur of painting and literature, he was patron to Raphael and Michelangelo, and commissioned the Last Judgement for the Sistine Chapel, though he did not live to see Michelangelo start work on it.
He was a disastrous pope. Raphael’s portrait of him as a cardinal in the background to his portrait of Leo X catches the self-contained, secretive complacency which was the chief mark of his character, and which made him baffling to his advisers and his adversaries. He was also hopelessly indecisive. Highly effective as second-in-command, he was paralysed by the possession of supreme authority, and had no more sense than his uncle Leo X of the urgency and magnitude of what was happening in Germany Like Leo, he seems not to have grasped the growing credibility gap between papal claims and cold reality. It was an age of growing assertiveness among the monarchs of Europe, and of the emergence of strong nation states dominated by powerful and frightening rulers – Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England, Charles V of Spain and the German empire. As the nations of Europe increasingly went their own way, Raphael’s workshop decorated Clement’s state rooms with frescoes glorifying the Donation of Constantine and the unchallenged supremacy of Rome.
While still a cardinal Clement had been an ardent supporter of the Emperor against the French. Everyone expected this policy to be continued, but in fact the Pope swung back and forth between France and empire. Up to a point, his indecision was understandable. Charles V was a far more devout Catholic than Francis I of France, but both men wanted to dominate northern Italy, where their armies were locked in conflict. From Clement’s point of view (both as pope and as a member of the Florentine ruling house of Medici) Charles was a particular threat. Inheriting the sovereignty not merely of Spain (and therefore Naples) but also of the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, not to mention the Spanish New World, he was the most powerful man in Europe. He controlled Naples: if he were to control Milan and Lombardy also, the papacy (and the other north Italian and Tuscan states) would be caught in a pincer movement, which Clement dreaded. Charles’ high sense of religious responsibility did not commend him in Rome, for he was heir also to the ancient imperial tradition of the Middle Ages, and he believed that he, rather than the Pope, was responsible for the well-being of the Church in his realms. Charles systematically eroded papal influence in the Church in Spain and southern Italy.
The years immediately after Clement’s election, therefore, were marked by repeated shifts of papal alliance between France and Spain, and by opportunistic papal attempts in northern Italy to erode imperial rule there and maintain the independence of Milan, which increasingly exasperated the Emperor. There was talk of the Emperor deposing the Pope, and of the confiscation and redistribution of the Papal States. The smouldering factionalism of the great Roman families was fanned into flame by these uncertainties, and Cardinal Pompeio Colonna planned a coup to unseat Clement and seize the papacy. On Monday, 6 May 1527 all this came to a head. The imperial armies based in northern Italy under the command of the renegade French Duke Charles of Bourbon had pushed south to consolidate imperial power in central Italy. Their advance triggered a rebellion against Medici rule in Florence, and Clements family were driven out of the city. Bourbon and his armies moved south to capture Rome.
None of the troops had been paid for months, and many of them were rabidly anti-papal Lutherans: from every point of view, the Eternal City was rich pickings. The Pope fled to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, his white robes disguised by a purple cloak thrown over them by one of his staff. For eight days the German army rampaged through Rome, raping, stabbing, burning. Horses were stabled in St Peters and the Sistine Chapel, Luther’s name was scribbled over Raphael’s painting in the Vatican Stanze. At least 4,000 citizens were killed, and every movable item of value was stolen. The Vatican Library survived only because one of the imperial commanders had set up his quarters (including his stables) there. Lutheran troops maddened with drink rampaged round Rome dressed in the robes of cardinals and popes. There were mock processions and blessings, and a troop of Lutheran soldiers assembled under the Pope’s window at the Castel Sant’ Angelo, insisting that they were going to eat him. Every cleric and citizen of means had to pay a ransom for their delivery, some as many as five or six times over, as gang after gang of soldiers repeatedly rounded up the same hostages. Cardinal del Monte, the future Pope Julius III, was hung up by his hair. The Pope’s ransom was set at 400,000 ducats, more than his annual income. His goldsmith, Benvenuto Cellini, set up a makeshift furnace in the Castel, and melted down all the surviving papal tiaras, except that of Julius II, to try to make up the amount.
The Sack of Rome shocked the conscience of Europe. Imperial propagandists tried to present it as a cleansing of the Augean stable, a fitting judgement on a city in which Christianity had been mocked by worldliness. Few Catholics accepted this. Even Erasmus, who had written so scathingly about the worldliness of the popes, deplored the spoliation of the city which was ‘not only the fortress of the Christian religion and the kindly mother of literary talent, but the tranquil home of the Muses, and indeed the
common mother of all peoples’.10 Clement, however, came to terms with Charles, crowning him emperor at Bologna in 1530, the last papal coronation of an emperor ever. The Papal States were restored to the Pope, his family re-established as rulers of Florence, and he returned to Rome.
But not to normalcy: it would take a decade for the city to recover from the trauma of the Sack. The population had halved, the artists had fled, building had stopped, house-prices plummeted. The spiritual ethos had shifted, too. Reformation was no longer a remote rumour from Germany. It had stalked with mailed boots through the streets of Rome, it had caroused from chalices, stripped the jewels from the bones of saints and from the covers of the Gospels. The golden bubble of the Renaissance had been punctured.
Meanwhile, Clement’s pontificate drew towards its inglorious close. His uneasy relations with Charles V made concerted action against Protestants in Germany impossible. It became increasingly clear that if the religious divisions of Germany were to be resolved, then it would have to be by a general council. Luther had called for such a council as early as 1520: by the 1530s, everyone wanted one. Everyone, that is, except the Pope. Protestants demanded that such a council should be ‘free’ and ‘Christian’, which sounded fine, till it became apparent that ‘free’ meant independent of the Pope – and therefore neither convened by him nor taking place on Italian soil. By ‘Christian’ Lutherans meant that laymen should take part in the Council on equal terms with bishops, and that all the Council’s decrees should be based exclusively on scripture. Agreement to these terms would be equivalent to conceding the whole Protestant case, and repudiating a view of the relation between Pope and Council which Rome had defended for a thousand years. Despite mounting pressure from Charles, Clement resisted. In the delay, the divisions of Western Christendom hardened and set. Germany and Switzerland descended into religious civil war, and Protestant teaching spread to the Netherlands, to France, even to Spain and Italy.