Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  His ordeal was far from over, however. As he was raising glasses with his supporters, the exasperated emperor drafted an edict to muzzle him. It was one of the few statements that Charles, in his thirty-seven-year reign, would write in his own hand. On the next morning (April 19, 1521), he had it read to a group of electors and top princes. Solemnly invoking his venerable forebears, Charles declared that, just as they had steadfastly defended the Catholic faith, he was now determined to do the same. “It is certain that a single monk must err if he stands against the opinion of all Christians. Otherwise Christendom itself would have erred for more than a thousand years. Therefore I am determined to set my kingdoms and dominions, my friends, my body, my life, my soul upon it.” The friar was to be allowed to return to his home in accord with the safe-conduct, but “without preaching or admonishing the people with his bad doctrine.” After the lapse of the safe-conduct, the emperor declared, he was determined to proceed against Luther “as against a notorious heretic.” He implored the members of the estates to join him in that action.

  With this statement, Charles established himself as the supreme defender of the old order—and as an implacable opponent of Luther. The German estates were not pleased. On hearing Charles’s words, they turned “pale as death,” as Aleander put it. As eager as many of them were to see Luther crushed, they knew that any attempt to enforce such a decree in the face of his fervent support could touch off violent disturbances.

  In fact, on the night of April 20—the same day the edict was read—Worms was hit by a new wave of fly sheets. Some backed the Church. “Luther! Pope and Kaiser have condemned you,” went one. “Now Frederick will not keep your safe-conduct, for in your madness you have merely brought up again the old heresies and presented nothing new.” Others came stridently to Luther’s defense. Posted to the door of the bishop’s palace where Charles was staying was a placard declaring, “Woe to the land whose king is a child!” Another, affixed to the doors of the cathedral, warned that four hundred nobles and a thousand foot soldiers stood ready to avenge any action taken against Luther. It swore violent opposition to the Romanists and especially to the archbishop of Mainz. At the bottom appeared the words Bundschuh, Bundschuh, Bundschuh. In the streets that night, the same words were eerily shouted.

  No phrase could have more chilled the princes and prelates in Worms. The Bundschuh, the sturdy leather shoe used by peasants, was the symbol of social revolt—the German equivalent of a pitchfork. For twenty years it had appeared on the banners of those challenging the established order in the name of economic justice and religious brotherhood. The leaders of these insurrections held that there could be no deliverance from exploitation until the property of counts was seized, the power of the Church was broken, and priests were driven from the land. In support, they cited Scripture. Though most of these revolts had been ruthlessly suppressed, discontent continued to simmer, and memories of the Hussite wars, with their heavy toll in blood and property, remained vivid. The appearance of the Bundschuh seemed a call to war.

  Adding to the alarm was the knowledge that, a day’s journey from Worms, Franz von Sickingen sat in the Ebernburg castle with a strike force far larger than what anyone in the town—even Charles—could marshal. With the volatile Hutten at Sickingen’s side, there were worries that his men would swoop into Worms and carry out a massacre. “The Emperor has not so much as four crippled soldiers with him, whereas Sickingen is better supplied with troops than any German prince,” Aleander wrote. The people of Worms “desire nothing more than the stamping out of the clergy.” With the threat of religious war looming, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, for one, became so panicked that he immediately sought out the emperor to express his fears. Charles ridiculed him, but the archbishop prepared to leave Worms at the first opportunity.

  In a meeting with the emperor in his quarters, the princes requested that, rather than condemn Luther outright, he appoint a panel of learned men to find a way to get him to admit at least some of his errors. As reluctant as he was to see the affair prolonged, Charles remained beholden to the estates in financial and military matters, and so he gave them three days to get Luther to acknowledge that he had erred. On April 22, 1521, a commission was appointed under the direction of Richard of Greiffenklau, the archbishop of Trier, whom Frederick had long proposed as an arbiter. Most of its members were moderate Catholics. At six o’clock on the morning of April 24, Luther, accompanied by a handful of aides and friends, appeared at Greiffenklau’s quarters.

  Having already endured a high-profile public scourging, Luther was now to undergo an intense private examination in a series of hearings. If he persisted in his dissent, he was told, civil disorders and anarchy could result. Already, the common people were using The Freedom of a Christian to throw off the yoke of the law and behave licentiously. If he wanted to avert further strife, Luther should offer some acknowledgment of the Church’s age-old authority to prescribe doctrine and define rites. To bolster their case, the interlocutors cited many passages from the Bible, but for each Luther countered with one of his own.

  As the conversations dragged on, the commissioners proposed one compromise after another, informing Luther that he need make only some small concessions while referring the other matters at issue to a council. When these remonstrations failed to budge him, the archbishop of Trier, in a final private conference, made one last appeal, holding out the prospect of a rich priory near one of his castles. In effect, he was trying to bribe Luther. The nuncios tersely captured his response: “He declined all that.” They let slip the real goal of these negotiations: the archbishop hoped to get him “to take back even a small part of his errors, which would have turned the whole people against him.”

  Luther no doubt understood this. Even the most modest concession on his part could have undermined his position as a fearless reformer and provoked a furious backlash. In the end, though, Luther was moved by a deeper concern. As he would put it in a letter a few days later, the pope was no judge of matters concerning the Word of God and his faith. A Christian must examine and judge such matters himself, for Scripture and faith are the property of every man in the community. Once again, Luther was asserting the supreme right of the individual Christian to interpret God’s Word. This, however, was something that the Church could not concede.

  Luther found the archbishop kind and gracious but unpersuasive. “Thus we parted”: with those simple words, Luther signaled his final break with the Church. After the archbishop left, an official from the emperor arrived to say that Luther should depart, and he handed him a new twenty-one-day safe-conduct. During that period, he was not to preach. After it expired, he was told, the emperor would act against him as he deserved.

  Having now been in Worms for ten days, Luther was desperate to leave despite the great danger he would face in returning to Wittenberg. Already, it was believed, Aleander and Caracciolo were plotting against him. As Luther prepared to go, however, he was informed that Frederick had devised an alternative plan, by which he would be transported not to Wittenberg but into hiding. The exact details were withheld, but the knowledge brightened Luther’s mood, and he spent his last night in Worms drinking more malmsey wine and bidding good-bye to his supporters. The next morning, April 26, 1521, the German Hercules toasted some slices of bread to fortify him for his trip. Between nine and ten o’clock, he and his party rumbled off in two carriages from his lodgings toward one of the city’s gates. No one knew exactly where Luther was going, but as he passed through the gate, a rift opened in Western Christendom.

  Outside, Luther was met by a troop of horsemen (probably sent by Sickingen at Hutten’s request). They rapidly covered the fifteen miles north to Oppenheim. There they were joined by the imperial herald, who was to accompany them back to Wittenberg. On reaching Frankfurt two days later, Luther wrote to Lucas Cranach that he had submitted to being “imprisoned” and hidden away, “though as yet I do not know where.” Though he would prefer to die at the hands of tyrants, he had
acceded to the counsel of good men. It was necessary to suffer and keep silent for a while, he added, “but Easter Sunday will also come to us”—a reference to martyrdom.

  Later that day or the next, at the village of Friedberg, north of Frankfurt, Luther—making one last effort to get through to the young emperor—completed the draft of a letter to him that he had been working on. Intensely emotional and free of the usual polemics, it expressed both his deep respect for Charles and his resolute attachment to Scripture. He was willing to obey his imperial majesty in life or death, glory or shame, gain or loss—in all matters, in fact, except those involving the Word of God. Offering once again to submit his books and doctrines to impartial judges and thanking the emperor for observing the safe-conduct while he was in Worms, Luther made one final plea: “I beg your Sacred Majesty by Christ, not to allow me to be crushed by my enemies, nor to suffer violence and be condemned, since I have so often offered to do what a Christian and an obedient subject ought.”

  Luther persuaded the imperial herald to carry the letter back to Worms and deliver it to the emperor. This was, in fact, a ploy to get him out of the way. The original copy of this letter has survived, bearing a note in Spalatin’s hand: “This letter was never given to the Emperor, because in all this host of nobles there was not one who would give it to him.” (In 1911, J. P. Morgan bought the letter for $25,500 and presented it to Wilhelm II, the last German emperor.)

  Luther and his party traveled northeast toward Thuringia. At Hersfeld, home to a famous Benedictine abbey, the chancellor and treasurer came out a mile to greet them. The abbot provided a fine meal and allowed Luther to sleep in his private guest room. He also urged Luther to preach, and, despite Luther’s reluctance to violate the ban on preaching, he did so, at five in the morning. When the party departed for Eisenach, the abbot accompanied it as far as the forest. As Luther neared the town where he had been a schoolboy, a delegation came out to meet him on foot, and again he preached, though the parish priest, frightened by the risk, testified before a notary that he had protested. The next day, the party split up, with Schurff and Jonas heading on to Erfurt and from there to Wittenberg, and Luther, together with Amsdorf and the student Petzensteiner, climbing up the Thuringian ridge to the village of Möhra, where his father had grown up and where his uncle still lived.

  On the morning of May 4, 1521, in Möhra, Luther preached in the open air. He dined in a garden near the priest’s house and preached again, this time to peasant and miner families, many of them his relatives. The next day, the party headed northeast toward Erfurt in the direction of the Altenstein Castle, on the southwestern slope of the Thuringian Forest not far from Eisenach. Passing through rolling grain fields, the group in the late afternoon arrived at a bridle crossing set deep in a grove of fir and pine trees. Suddenly a troop of armed horsemen flashing weapons appeared out of the woods. Panicking, Petzensteiner vaulted out of the cart and ran off. “Do not become excited,” Luther whispered to Amsdorf. “We are among friends.” Pointing his crossbow, the leader of the group demanded to know who was being transported. When Luther identified himself, the man ordered him to surrender. With curses and feigned roughness, Luther was snatched from the cart, but not before he was able to grab two of his most precious possessions—a Hebrew Bible and a Greek New Testament (no doubt a version of Erasmus’s edition). Amsdorf and the driver were sent on their way. To an accompaniment of curses, Luther was placed in a harness and forced to run alongside the horsemen as they headed into the forest. (The spot of the abduction is today marked by an obelisk twenty-five feet high, the forest still thick around it.)

  After a short distance, Luther was blindfolded and put on a horse. For several hours he was led northward through the woods on a zigzag route designed to elude possible pursuers. Finally, at about eleven in the evening and some fifteen miles from the point where he had been seized, he was led up a steep ridge and across a lowered drawbridge into a fortress. From the parapets, courtyards, and columns, he could see at once where he was—the Wartburg, the medieval castle outside Eisenach, which he knew from his school days in that town. The captain of the castle, Hans von Berlepsch, led him up a ladder to two small rooms. After taking some food, Luther—drained from the ordeal he had endured over the past month—fell asleep, his whereabouts a source of mystery and speculation across Europe.

  Part IV

  Agitation

  27

  The Martyr’s Crown

  The news of Luther’s disappearance caused astonishment and alarm across Europe. His “abduction” had been pulled off so flawlessly that few knew where he was or even if he was alive. One report had him fleeing to Denmark to seek the protection of its king, Christian II. Another had him going to Bohemia to take shelter with the Hussites. Luther was also reported to have been seized by a robber-knight and his body discovered in a mine, run through with a sword—a deed widely attributed to the papal nuncios. Aleander himself believed that Luther had taken refuge in the Ebernburg castle with a plan to “raise a rebellion,” as he reported to Rome.

  The distress many felt at Luther’s disappearance was captured by Albrecht Dürer in his diary. “I know not whether he yet lives or is murdered, but in any case he has suffered for the Christian truth,” he wrote on May 17, 1521. He called on all pious Christians to join him in weeping over “this God-illumined man and beg Him to send us another enlightened one.” Dürer had a particular candidate in mind:

  O Erasmus of Rotterdam, where are thou? See what the unjust tyranny of earthly power, the power of darkness, can do. Hear, thou Knight of Christ! Ride forth by the side of the Lord Christ; defend the truth, gain the martyr’s crown! As it is, thou are but an old man. I have heard thee say that thou hast given thyself but a couple more years of active service; spend them, I pray, to the profit of the gospel and the true Christian faith, and believe me, the gates of Hell, the See of Rome, as Christ has said, will not prevail against thee.

  Even with Luther’s swift rise, Erasmus clearly remained a beacon to reform-minded Europeans. At this critical moment in the revolt against Rome, they looked to him for some dramatic gesture. Erasmus had no intention of obliging, however. For one thing, he had heard that Luther “perhaps is in safe keeping,” as he wrote to Ludwig Baer, a theologian in Basel, ten days after his disappearance—a testament to Erasmus’s unrivaled network of sources. He felt, moreover, that Luther had partly brought his troubles on himself and in the process emboldened the enemies of the humanities, putting “into the hands of certain raging madmen” the weapon they had long sought to destroy good letters. While in Cologne, Erasmus had tried to find a solution to the crisis, but then “lo and behold,” Luther had burned the decretals, published The Babylonian Captivity, and issued his “over-emphatic assertions” against the bull, thus making “the evil to all appearance incurable.”

  After returning to Louvain from Antwerp in the spring of 1521, Erasmus was assailed with ever greater bitterness by the monks and mendicants. He was widely alleged to have written The Lamentations of Peter, an anonymous dialogue in which the authors of the New Testament complain that no one reads their books anymore; Erasmus in fact had nothing to do with it. “There is not a drinking-party without passionate arguments about Luther, and then the disputation deviates onto Erasmus,” he wrote. He became so exasperated with one critic, the Dominican Vincentius Theoderici, that he drafted a ten-thousand-word open letter of admonishment. “Ever since you moved to Louvain,” he fumed, “you have never ceased to deliver wild attacks on my reputation at every opportunity.”

  Erasmus was especially disturbed to learn that throughout Luther’s stay in Worms, Justus Jonas had been by his side. Of all the younger German humanists, Jonas had long seemed among the most promising. With Ulrich von Hutten having already declared himself for Luther and Philipp Melanchthon working closely with him in Wittenberg, Erasmus feared that the next generation of humanists was moving into Luther’s camp. Hoping to reverse the trend, Erasmus in mid-May 1521 wrote a long ap
peal to Jonas that was in fact aimed at these younger reformers in general.

  Its central message: Luther was too rash and reckless. “I wonder very much, dear Jonas, what god has stirred up Luther’s heart to make him write with such freedom of invective against the Roman pontiff, against all the universities, against philosophy, and against the mendicant orders.” From the small selection of his writings that he had read, he could tell that Luther had set forth his ideas in language that was bound to offend. Rather than husband the truth, he had “in a savage torrent of invective” poured it out “all at once, making everything public and giving even cobblers a share in what is normally handled by scholars as mysteries reserved for the initiated.”

  It would be far wiser, he went on, to follow the example of Christ, who said one thing to the multitudes and another to his disciples; of Paul, who declared that he wanted to become all things to all men, that he might gain all for Christ; and of Augustine, who, in arguing with the Donatists and the Manicheans, mixed in charity with his indignation. Skilled physicians do not at the very start administer their ultimate remedies; they first prepare the patient’s body with less powerful drugs, then adjust the dose so as to cure and not overwhelm. By contrast, Luther through his impulsiveness had caused great strife, and as a result, Erasmus lamented, “my own work has lost a great part of the effect I hoped for.” Above all else, it was necessary to avoid the discord that would “be disastrous to every man of good will.” What was required was “a sort of holy cunning,” by which the treasure of the Bible could be gradually revealed and the standards of public morality restored.