Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Leo brought his family’s priceless library from Florence and opened it to scholars. He lured from Venice the great Hellenist Marcus Musurus along with ten men of virtuous disposition to teach Greek and establish a Greek printing press. He appointed two celebrated humanists, Jacopo Sadoleto and Pietro Bembo, as his secretaries, both of whom were known for their pure Ciceronian Latin. A passionate lover of music, Leo kept an instrument in his room on which to improvise, brought celebrated performers from around Europe, and bestowed on a Spaniard whose voice he especially liked the archbishopric of Bari. He had an ear for poetry as well and showered patronage on the crowds of Roman rimatori who turned out sonetti and canzoni in the style of Petrarch and odes and eclogues echoing Horace and Virgil. Leo was particularly fond of the improvisatori—quick-witted versifiers able to compose clever poems on the spot on themes suggested by the pontiff and his dinner mates. Leo’s reputation as a champion of learning was burnished by his friendship with Erasmus, who paid effusive tribute to him in his dedication to the New Testament.

  But Leo had a reputation for self-indulgence as well. “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us,” he is reported to have said upon his accession, and though the line is probably apocryphal, it captures his unflagging pursuit of pleasure. His inaugural procession was the most opulent spectacle in Rome since the days of the emperors, with Leo riding on a white Arab stallion through streets decorated with triumphal arches, shielded from the sun by a baldacchino of embroidered silk borne by eight Roman patricians. As pope, he lost some eight thousand ducats a month at cards; distributed purses of gold to guests who sang with him; and kept a menagerie that included lions, civet cats, apes, and a snow-white elephant named Hanno, who was a gift from the king of Portugal and became the talk of Rome. The papal household, which under Julius II had numbered fewer than two hundred, ballooned to nearly seven hundred under Leo. An avid hunter, he devoted a month every autumn to the chase. Too ungainly and nearsighted to participate, he would instead follow the hunt from a makeshift stand; when a boar was snared in a net, Leo would move in and, bearing a spear in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, deliver the coup de grâce, to the applause of his retinue.

  Carcasses of exotic animals arrived by the cartload in Rome, where they were prepared by an army of cooks for the pontifical table; peacock tongues and lampreys cooked in a Cretan wine sauce were particular favorites. Entertainment was provided by not only musical ensembles but also an array of dwarfs, jesters, and buffoons, the most famous of whom was Fra Mariano Fetti, a ribald Dominican friar known for his coarse manners and ability to consume up to forty eggs at a sitting. For all his refined sensibilities, Leo loved vulgarity. He also enjoyed theatrical pieces, the more indecent and farcical the better. When it came to saying Mass and performing other divine offices, Leo was conscientious, but if the ceremonies went on too long, he became uncomfortable, perspiring profusely under his heavy robes.

  St. Peter’s posed a special challenge. As a cardinal, Leo had suffered through the Masses that Julius had presided over in the increasingly exposed basilica, braving the frigid gusts of winter and the broiling sheen of summer. When he became pope, he refused to perform his first Easter Mass in the basilica, owing to the inclement conditions, and used the Sistine Chapel instead. Leo instructed Bramante to build a temporary shelter over the altar so that he could carry out his officiating duties in comfort.

  Then, a year into Leo’s pontificate, in 1514, Bramante died. During the nine years when he had been in charge, the four great piers designed to support the massive dome had been completed and joined to soaring coffered vaults, and the floor plan was marked out by huge Corinthian pilasters. Work had also begun on the corner chapels. Overall, though, the new basilica remained little more than a skeleton, and Bramante left no instructions for how to proceed. What’s more, major structural concerns had begun to emerge: the foundations of the new basilica were shifting, cracks had appeared in the piers, weeds were sprouting in the aisles.

  To take Bramante’s place as lead architect, Leo selected his favorite artist, Raphael. Leo loved the frescoes Raphael had applied to the walls of the stanze of the Vatican and shared his easygoing sensuality. Raphael for his part exulted in being named head of “the greatest building project ever seen” (as he described it in a letter to his uncle), and every day he had an audience with the pope, at which St. Peter’s was a prominent subject. But Raphael was at heart a painter, with little architectural experience. (His famous portrait of Leo, now hanging in the Uffizi, captures the pope’s plump refinement.) Two other architects were assigned to help him with the basilica, but the project became mired in rivalries, backstabbing, bitter disputes over its basic shape, and continual alterations in plans. Bramante had designed the basilica as a Greek cross, with four equal arms; Raphael changed it to a Latin cross, with a long nave added to the central area, but this added to concerns about the project’s cost.

  And that cost was skyrocketing. Leo had to make huge outlays just to keep the work crews intact while those in charge pursued other projects. Money was squandered, expenses were inflated, and few cost controls were imposed. For the outer walls, Leo insisted on ordering the most expensive travertine. In his first year alone, he budgeted sixty thousand ducats for St. Peter’s, more than twice the already immense sums allocated by Julius.

  Upon his death, Julius had left a large surplus in the Vatican treasury, but within two years Leo had frittered it all away. To try to keep the Holy See afloat, he resorted to all sorts of revenue-generating schemes. He created new cardinalates and charged thousands of ducats for each. He announced hundreds of new offices and put them up for sale (bringing the total number at the Vatican to around 1,200). He borrowed heavily from the banking houses of Rome, which, seeing his need, charged exorbitant interest rates. Finally, he expanded the offering of indulgences. These came in many varieties. There were confessional letters that freed the penitent from having to confess to a local priest. There were dispensations that allowed the substitution of other good works for vows that had been made in haste and were difficult to keep. There were the ever-popular “butter letters,” which permitted the consumption of eggs, milk, and cheese during fast days. There were even indulgences that sanctioned the possession of illegally acquired goods if the rightful owners had died or could not be found.

  The pope’s authority to issue indulgences derived from an inventive doctrine developed by Scholastic theologians. Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, they maintained, had performed so many meritorious acts beyond the satisfactions required of them that there had accumulated in heaven a treasury of surplus merits, which could be used to make up for the debts contracted by others. Under the authority of the 1343 Extravagante Unigenitus, the pope could draw on this treasury and allocate its merits to individual sinners to remit the temporal penalties they had incurred for their sins. In 1476, Sixtus IV, in a highly controversial move, declared that indulgences could remit the sins of not only the living but also the souls of the deceased in purgatory. With Christians desperate to alleviate the suffering of their departed loved ones, the clamor for indulgences grew.

  To add to their allure, the Vatican in the fifteenth century began issuing indulgence letters. Adorned with a papal signature and seal and leaving a space for the name of the purchaser, they provided penitents with tangible evidence of their commuted sentences. With the rise of printing, the letters were run off in large quantities. In Rome, a special bureau was set up to prepare marketing plans for each indulgence, and preachers were deployed across the Alps with the precision of a military operation. The financial aspects were managed by the Fuggers, Europe’s richest family. Based in Augsburg, they had branches in many European cities, including Rome, and as the indulgence trade grew, they converted their office in that city into a full-time indulgence agency. The indulgence collection boxes were secured with iron bands, and they could be opened only in the presence of a company agent—a safeguard aimed at preventing embezzle
ment, which was common. Over time, indulgences became a central part of the Vatican’s finances, and by the accession of Julius II they were accounting for up to half the revenues of the Datary.

  As was the custom, Leo on becoming pope announced the revocation of all the indulgences that had been proclaimed by his predecessor, with one exception—the St. Peter’s indulgence. This he would expand. As stipulated in the authorizing bull (dated March 31, 1515), the indulgence was to be sold for eight years in the church provinces of Mainz and Magdeburg and the state of Brandenburg (as well as in parts of France and the low countries). Those obtaining it did not have to make confession or visit churches and altars but had only to purchase the indulgence letter; those obtaining indulgences on behalf of the departed did not have to be contrite of heart, since the granting of the indulgence depended on the state of grace of the soul at the time of death. All vows except monastic ones could be commuted through the indulgence, and dispensations were available for almost all types of offenses, including adultery.

  In issuing this bull, Leo paid little heed to the resentment that was building in Germany at the growing financial encroachments of Rome. Chancery dues, consecration fees, new tithes, annates (the payment to the Curia of the first year’s income of new benefices)—all placed a great burden on the German people. Unlike England, France, the Low Countries, and Spain, the Holy Roman Empire lacked a strong central government, so papal tax collectors were able to operate at will. The anger over Rome’s usurpations was feeding a new sense of German nationalism rooted in a hatred of all things Italian. It found expression in the long list of grievances submitted at the imperial diets (assemblies) held every two or three years. These gravamina (as they were called) were filled with complaints about the insistent demands for money by the Curia and the excesses connected with them. In these lists, indulgences always received prominent mention as instruments through which ordinary people were misled and bilked of their savings.

  The St. Peter’s indulgence had one feature so potentially inflammatory that great efforts were made to conceal it. In 1514, a vacancy had opened in the archbishopric of Mainz. This was the most powerful ecclesiastical post in Germany, in part because it controlled one of the seven votes to elect the Holy Roman Emperor. Among those hungrily eyeing it was Prince Joachim of Brandenburg, a leading member of the House of Hohenzollern—one of the great German families. (It would rule Prussia for four centuries.) Seeing the decisive political advantage that this position could bring, Joachim put forward his brother Albrecht.

  Albrecht was not a model candidate. He was fond of food and women and had only a rudimentary knowledge of theology. That, however, was no bar to holding ecclesiastical office, and in 1513 he had been named both archbishop of Magdeburg and the administrator of the diocese of Halberstadt. Canon law prohibited him from holding yet another position, and at twenty-four he was well short of the minimum age for the Mainz post. For him to fill it, then, a special papal dispensation would be needed. The pope was happy to provide it—for a price. On top of the standard fee for the office, the Vatican imposed a hefty special levy, bringing the total to more than twenty thousand ducats.

  Even for a family as wealthy as the Hohenzollerns, this was an enormous sum, and to figure out how to raise it, they turned to the Fuggers. Drawing on their long experience in the indulgence trade, the Fuggers came up with a creative arrangement: they would advance the family the entire fee, and to help repay it, the pope would grant Albrecht jurisdiction over the St. Peter’s indulgence. After expenses were deducted, half the remainder would go to the Fuggers to repay the loan and the other half to Rome to support the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. In other words, a significant portion of the money being handed over by hardworking Germans in their effort to avoid the torments of purgatory was to go to support the ecclesiastical ambitions of the callow scion of a princely family. Because of various delays, the preaching of the indulgence would not begin until early 1517, when Johann Tetzel set out on his sales tour of eastern Germany.

  As Tetzel peddled the indulgence, Luther was completing his lectures on the Epistle to the Galatians. In this document, Paul emphatically asserts his belief that works without faith cannot lead to salvation, and Luther echoed his vehemence. Without Christ’s resurrection, he wrote, no one can rise, “no matter how many good works he does.” Grace comes not from works but from faith in Christ. Throughout, Luther relied heavily on Erasmus’s annotations. The humanist’s grammatical observations proved invaluable in unlocking the meaning of Paul’s statements. Luther’s notes were filled with phrases like “I follow Erasmus,” “as Erasmus says,” and “that excellent man” Erasmus.

  Yet the more Luther read Erasmus, the more disenchanted he became. “I am reading our Erasmus but daily I dislike him more and more,” he wrote to Johann Lang on March 1, 1517. While pleased that Erasmus was constantly “exposing and condemning the monks and priests for their deep-rooted and sleepy ignorance,” he regretted that “he does not advance the cause of Christ and the grace of God sufficiently,” for “human things weigh more with him than the divine.” He went on:

  I see that not everyone is a truly wise Christian just because he knows Greek and Hebrew. St. Jerome with his five languages cannot be compared with Augustine, who knew only one language. Erasmus, however, is of an absolutely different opinion on this. But the discernment of one who attributes weight to man’s will is different from that of him who knows of nothing else but grace.

  Luther added that he wanted to keep his opinion of Erasmus secret so that he would not “strengthen the conspiracy of his enemies.” Nonetheless, his early judgment that Erasmus favored the human over the divine would prove unshakable. So would Luther’s preference for Augustine over Jerome. It is remarkable to see Erasmus and Luther reenacting the debate that those two great Doctors had conducted more than a millennium earlier.

  At the university, meanwhile, Luther was progressing in his campaign to overthrow the Scholastics and institute a curriculum reflecting the gospel of grace. “Our theology and St. Augustine are progressing well and with God’s help rule our university,” he wrote in May 1517. Aristotle “is gradually falling from his throne, and his final doom is only a matter of time.” That summer, when Luther began lecturing on the Epistle to the Hebrews, so many students signed up that the meeting time was moved from the early morning to noon—the hour reserved for the most popular classes. He also won over Andreas von Karlstadt, the dean of the Wittenberg faculty. Initially, Karlstadt, a committed Thomist, had strenuously opposed any changes in the curriculum, but at Luther’s urging he had bought an edition of Augustine’s works, and as he read through it he experienced an emotional crisis that left him convinced that Luther’s ideas about the misapprehensions of the Scholastics and the supreme importance of faith and grace were correct.

  In September, Luther was scheduled to preside over a doctoral disputation, and, seeking to deliver a fatal blow to the old school, he prepared ninety-seven theses against Scholastic theology. In them, he attacked Scotus, Ockham, and Biel for spreading false ideas about free will and good works and doing all that one can. We are not masters of our will but its servants, he declared. No one can become righteous without the grace of God; all who seek salvation through works are condemned. Toward Aristotle, Luther was unsparing. “It is an error to say that no man can become a theologian without Aristotle,” he wrote. Indeed, “no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle.” Aristotle “is to theology as darkness is to light.” More than three centuries after the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, the philosopher’s grip on Western theology was loosening, and Luther’s theses would serve as a sort of epitaph.

  In the late summer or early autumn of 1517, Luther saw a copy of a booklet that, bearing the seal of the archbishop of Mainz, contained the instructions for the St. Peter’s indulgence. Until then, Luther had assumed that the many outlandish claims made by Tetzel had been the product of his own hucksterism and zeal, but the pamphlet
showed that they were authorized by not only Albrecht but the pope himself. It was the pope who had granted the complete remission of all sins and had done away with all the accompanying pain of purgatory. And it was the pope who had decreed that, even without confession or contrition, one could obtain the complete remission of all sins for those souls in purgatory.

  The pamphlet even had a fee schedule for the purchase of the indulgence: twenty-five guilders for kings, queens, archbishops, and bishops; ten guilders for counts, barons, abbots, and other higher prelates; six guilders for lesser prelates and nobles; three florins for well-off citizens and merchants; and a half florin for citizens of lesser means. (For those with no means, prayer was deemed sufficient.) Finally, preachers were urged to give the benefits attached to the indulgence “the widest publicity, since through the same, help will surely come to departed souls, and the construction of the church of St. Peter will be abundantly promoted at the same time.”

  To Luther, it was all becoming clear: to support the construction of a sumptuous new temple in Rome, the pope and his agents were gulling the German people into believing that, by handing over their hard-earned cash for these certificates, they could gain remission of their sins without having to feel any regret or repentance. On his visit to Rome years earlier, Luther had seen the collection boxes at the Datary but paid them little attention. Now, reading the instructions for the St. Peter’s indulgence, he could see how greedy and grasping the Holy See had become.