As the fifteenth century drew to a close, the Latin Church was completing seven centuries as the dominant institution in northern Europe. Its spires defined the skyline, its bells tolled the hours, its calendar determined the rhythm of work and rest, and its courts had jurisdiction over everything from inheritances and interest rates to blasphemy and adultery. The Church even determined what one could eat: there were almost seventy days during the year when adults were required to fast (i.e., abstain from meat and other animal products like milk and cheese). There were an additional forty or fifty feast days when the faithful were expected to abstain from work and to fast the night before. Through the seven sacraments, the Church ruled over the key passages in a Christian’s life, including baptism, confirmation, marriage, and last rites. When not hosting services, churches served as community centers, with parishioners stopping by to close deals, hear the latest news, arrange celebrations—even hold trysts.
Most of all, the Church offered hope and consolation in a treacherous and unforgiving world. Fires and floods, famine and war, epidemics and contagions, brigandage and riots all helped to make daily life a tissue of anxiety and dread. Stark memories remained of the Black Death, the outbreak of plague from 1348 to 1350 that had carried off an estimated 35 million people—one-third of Western Europe’s population; entire villages were wiped out in a catastrophe not equaled before or since. The plague remained a constant threat, and dysentery, malaria, influenza, typhoid, diphtheria, and St. Anthony’s fire (which blistered, deformed, and killed its victims) were all rampant. As many as one of every three women died in their first childbirth; as many as one of every four children died before the age of one. Desperate to ward off such calamities, the faithful sought whatever protection they could. The Church responded with an array of customs, practices, and institutions that were both broadly popular and, increasingly, loudly criticized.
Veneration of the saints was one such practice. By virtue of their exemplary lives, the saints were believed to be endowed with a special ability to intercede with God through Christ on behalf of the devout. St. Christopher offered protection to travelers. St. Nicholas could help rescue children from danger. St. Barbara offered protection against sudden and violent death at work, and St. George could help one from falling into the hands of the enemy. The Fourteen Holy Helpers stood ready to relieve a variety of debilitating conditions, from plague and epilepsy to headaches and toothaches. And every occupation had its own patron—Crispen for leatherworkers and Cecilia for musicians, Honoratus for bakers and Bernard for candle makers.
Across Europe, shrines to the saints proliferated, and roadways were filled with crowds of pilgrims heading to them. While Jerusalem and Rome were the most hallowed destinations, Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain was the most popular. In its magnificent Romanesque cathedral there lay (it was said) the remains of the apostle James. Four roads originating at different points in France passed through the Pyrenees to join the nearly five-hundred-mile camino to the town, located just inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Around the cathedral’s altar rose piles of abandoned crutches, model ships, and wax replicas of limbs, eyes, and breasts, all bearing witness to the saint’s miraculous ability to heal and rescue.
The popularity of a shrine depended on the quality of its relics. These included bones, teeth, strips of flesh, locks of hair, and articles of clothing, all offering physical proximity to the saint’s prowess and prestige. Churches boasted slivers of the True Cross, shreds from the tablecloth of the Last Supper, thorns from Christ’s crown, patches of his swaddling clothes. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the trade in relics soared as the market was flooded with shriveled body parts whose authenticity could not be verified. While St. Elizabeth of Hungary lay in state, in 1231, a crowd of worshippers tore away strips of the linen enveloping her face and cut off her hair, her nails, even her nipples. Fourteen churches in Europe claimed to have the head of John the Baptist.
By far the most venerated figure was Mary. Though receiving only minor mention in the New Testament, the Virgin Mother in the late Middle Ages became the center of a fervent cult that revered her as a source of mercy far more approachable than the righteous Father or the judging Son. All over Europe, chapels and shrines displayed jars and vials of Mary’s milk, the viewing of which was said to speed one’s wishes to God. Hundreds of churches were consecrated to Mary, ships were named after her, and stories multiplied about her miraculous intervention in the world on behalf of the troubled and bereft.
Meanwhile, the Mass—the centerpiece of Catholic worship—was invested with all sorts of wonder-working powers. People raced from church to church to be present at the Eucharist, when the bread and wine were transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ, for witnessing it was considered a means of accumulating merit in the eyes of God. On their deathbed, many noblemen and merchants—worried about the agonies they might face in the afterlife—left all or part of their possessions to their local church to create an endowment for the saying of Masses on their behalf that could speed their passage through purgatory.
Through such bequests, churches and monasteries grew wealthy. Many cloisters amassed large estates, turning abbots into landlords who saw the laity as tenants to be managed rather than souls to be cured. Even the Franciscans, whose rule stipulated that they go barefoot among the poor and support themselves by begging, became rich and built imposing friaries. Bishops and cardinals behaved like secular princes, maintaining lavish courts and meddling in political affairs. Some monasteries kept large packs of hounds, which were allowed to run wild and which ate the food that should have gone to the poor. At all levels of clerical life, absenteeism grew, concubinage spread, and tales of ignorance multiplied.
The papacy, meanwhile, was in utter turmoil. In 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was elected pope. He had his coronation in Lyon, then moved to Avignon in 1309. So began a period of papal exile that came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. During it, the popes remained subservient to the French king, and the Holy See became notorious for its nepotism and simony (the sale of offices). When the Babylonian Captivity finally ended, in 1377, the Church plunged into the Great Schism, during which there was a pope in Rome and an antipope in Avignon, each with his own college of cardinals and profit-seeking curia; at one point, there were not two pontiffs but three. By the time the Church again had one Holy Father, in 1417, its sacred aura had been badly tarnished.
The rampant anticlericalism of the late Middle Ages was reflected in two of its greatest literary works. In Boccaccio’s Decameron (written in the early 1350s), a group of young Florentines fleeing the plague take refuge in a secluded villa and tell one another stories to pass the time. Clerical lechery and hypocrisy are recurrent themes. In one of the most famous tales, a monk—approached by an innocent young woman saying she wants to get closer to God—offers to show her how to “put the devil back in Hell”; he then deflowers her. (She so enjoys the experience that she repeatedly asks the monk to put the devil back in Hell.) In The Canterbury Tales (begun in 1387), thirty or so pilgrims travel from south London to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury cathedral. Of them all, the Pardoner, a seller of absolution for sins, is by far the most corrupt; he freely acknowledges that the relic bones he sells come from pigs, not departed saints, and that he pockets the proceeds rather than hand them over to the Church. Instead of feeling remorse over such ruses, he takes pride in their ingenuity.
Chaucer’s pilgrims capture the paradoxical status of the late medieval Church. On the one hand, they are willing to endure the discomfort of a sixty-mile journey over rough roads to visit a shrine and take advantage of its supposedly miraculous powers—a reflection of the strength of popular piety. On the other, a cleric entrusted with the sacred power of pardon is shown to be given over to greed and deceit. By the late fifteenth century, the Church seemed more mighty—and compromised—than ever. And the voices of dissent were growing louder.
Four such voices—comme
morated in the great Reformation monument in Worms—helped prepare the way for that religious transformation. Erected in 1868, the monument shows a statue of Luther atop a pedestal, with the four forerunners seated below. All four questioned the practices of the medieval Church, driven by their conviction—drawn from reading Scripture—that it had strayed too far from the spirit of the apostolic church. Peter Waldus was a twelfth-century merchant from Lyon who gave away his possessions, donned plain clothes, placed his wife and daughter in a convent, and preached repentance to the urban masses. Around him there formed a band of followers, called Waldensians, whose resolute rejection of devotional practices not mentioned in the Bible led to intense persecution by the Church. (In 1545, hundreds of Waldensians living in villages in southeastern France were massacred on the order of King Francis I.)
John Wyclif was a fourteenth-century Oxford don who, going around barefoot in a long russet gown, attacked the Church for its temporal holdings and urged it to distribute its wealth to the poor. In addition to producing a flood of theological and polemical tracts, he inspired a group of disciples to translate the Vulgate (Latin) Bible into English. After his death, in 1384, his followers, called Lollards (from a Dutch word meaning “mumblers”), met in secret to read the Bible in English and keep alive the principle that Scripture should be the sole foundation of a Christian’s life.
Wyclif’s greatest disciple, however, was found not in England but in Bohemia. Jan Hus was a professor of theology at the University of Prague who, through reading Wyclif and the Bible, became an outspoken advocate for reform. Excommunicated, he retreated to the countryside, where he turned out a series of tracts in which he condemned the entire framework of the Roman Church, including the papacy, as not sanctioned by Scripture. For such views, Hus was summoned before the Council of Constance in 1414. He was offered a safe-conduct, but upon his arrival it was revoked, and the following year, after refusing repeated demands that he recant, he was burned at the stake.
No less unfortunate was Girolamo Savonarola, a charismatic Dominican friar who drew overflow crowds to the church of San Marco in Florence with fierce denunciations of clerical dissolution and apocalyptic visions of the city transformed into the New Jerusalem. After the exile of the Medici, in 1494, Savonarola became the city’s de facto ruler. During carnival season, he organized a “bonfire of the vanities,” into which were fed musical instruments, playing cards, risqué paintings, women’s toiletries, and other supposed symbols of moral decay. With Florence placed under a papal interdict and Savonarola’s lurid prophesies failing to materialize, the population turned against him, and in 1498 he was hanged on the same spot on which the bonfire had burned the previous year.
As all these cases show, Rome demanded full compliance with its authority and was willing to use savage means to enforce it. Yet there was another forerunner of the Reformation who managed to escape persecution and who—though absent from the Worms monument—played a critical part in preparing the way for change.
As a young man, Geert Groote (born in Deventer in 1340) liked the good life. A wandering scholar, he moved from town to town in search of books, conversation, and women. At one point, though, he fell ill and, worried about his fate in the afterlife, felt intense remorse at the many years he had spent gratifying his desires. Recovering, he decided to start afresh. He opened his house to several poor women, burned his large collection of books on magic, and studied the Bible and the Church Fathers, especially Augustine, whose struggles to control his fleshly impulses seemed to mirror Groote’s own. Groote spent two years in a Carthusian monastery, fasting regularly and praying into the night. Having found a living faith, however, he wanted to share it with others and so left the cloister.
Embarking on a roving ministry, Groote urged his listeners to disdain worldly honors, shun external observances, and nourish the spirit within. Like Christ, they should endure their trials in humble submission and extend their love for him to their fellow man. While reproving the clergy for their indolence and dissolution, Groote steered clear of doctrine and expressed respect for the pope. His concern was for the inner development of the individual rather than the sacramental power of the Church. The best way to reach God was not through rites like baptism or confession but through an inner kernel of devotion. Inviting young people into his home to study the Bible, he put them to work copying manuscripts while urging them to return to the Gospels.
At the time of Groote’s death, in 1384, some of his followers were living in simple piety in the home of the vicar of St. Lebwin’s church in Deventer. As word of the community spread, others came to join it. They were attacked by the mendicant friars, who insisted that living in common without taking monastic vows violated Church canons, but for these disciples the whole point was to have a holy life outside the cloister. Like-minded communities began to form throughout the IJssel valley. Under the banner of inner renewal, the Devotio Moderna spread westward throughout Holland, southward into Flanders, and eastward into Germany. A parallel network of houses for women also arose. These communities became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. Because some members preferred a more structured environment, a monastery founded on the principles of the Devotio Moderna was established near Zwolle, not far from Deventer, and by the mid-fifteenth century dozens of branches had arisen throughout northwestern Europe.
From one of these monasteries would emerge Groote’s most influential disciple. Thomas à Kempis was in his twenties when, in the early fifteenth century, he entered the monastery of Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle. He would remain for nearly seventy years, copying and composing devotional tracts while wrestling with his longings, urges, and doubts. Over time, he compiled some two thousand homiletic statements (about half of them from the Bible) that offered comfort and inspiration. These became the basis for The Imitation of Christ. Influenced by the medieval mystics, Thomas urged readers to achieve union with God by shunning the outside world and cultivating the inner spirit. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” he wrote, quoting Christ. “Forsake this wretched world and your soul shall find rest. Learn to despise external things, to devote yourself to those that are within.”
Habit and tonsure, he declared, profit a man little; a change of heart and the shackling of the passions make a true monk. Rather than run off to distant shrines and kiss sacred bones, the truly religious stay at home, work hard, and pray intently. They disdain wealth, forswear honors, avoid gossip, shun the company of the powerful, and resist the impulses of the flesh. We should not take pride in our deeds or consider ourselves better than others. And we should spurn all learning that does not deepen our relationship with God. On Judgment Day, “we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done”; not how well we have spoken, but how well we have lived. There was but one path to salvation and everlasting life—through the cross. By taking it up, a man can make his own life one of Christlike mortification.
Thomas’s vision of internal purification through surrender to God strongly appealed to educated Europeans who felt unfulfilled by rote prayers and sacramental rites. Initially circulating in manuscript form, The Imitation of Christ was copied by hand and passed from cloister to cloister. The first printed edition appeared around 1473; nearly fifty more editions appeared by the end of the fifteenth century and another sixty-five during the sixteenth. Thomas More would call the Imitation one of the three books everyone should own; Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, read a chapter a day and regularly gave away copies. Translated into hundreds of languages and appearing in more than five thousand editions, the Imitation remains the bestselling Christian book after the Bible.
Erasmus would not be among its admirers. He was never one for spiritual contemplation. Nor did he place much value on austerity and self-denial. Most off-putting of all was Thomas’s disdain for secular knowledge. “Do not desire the reputation of being learned,” Thomas wrote—but Erasmus desired little else. Later in life, he would dismiss the Brethren of the Common Life
as small-minded and provincial. Whereas Thomas taught withdrawal from the world, Erasmus yearned to enter and experience it. Yet while he was in Deventer, and without being quite aware of it, he was being imprinted with the movement’s ideas about inward religion, simple piety, and imitating Christ, and he would carry them with him as he moved into the outside world.
Toward the end of his stay in Deventer, Erasmus caught an exciting glimpse of that world. In 1484, when he was seventeen or so, St. Lebwin’s received a visit from the humanist scholar Rodolphus Agricola. A native of Frisia on the North Sea who had been schooled by the Brethren, Agricola had joined the flow of northerners to Italy in search of Renaissance enlightenment. For ten years he had read the Roman classics, studied Greek, and written books on rhetoric and logic. Returning home, he embarked on a lecture tour promoting the New Learning, as the revival of interest in classical culture was called. Despite his association with the Brethren, Agricola had little sympathy for their piety and asceticism. He was a bohemian who loved food, fame, and conversation. At the same time, he considered himself a devout Christian intent on practicing the spirit of the Gospels, and he sought to harmonize classical ideals and Christian precepts in a creed he called the philosophy of Christ.
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