Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  But Erasmus had not seen him for years, and in the meantime he had undergone a dramatic transformation. After receiving a doctorate in theology from the University of Basel, Oecolampadius in 1518 had taken a position as a preacher at the cathedral in Augsburg. While there, he had felt drawn to Luther’s teachings. He resigned his position and entered a Brigittine monastery in Altomünster, near Munich, to reflect. There he produced two tracts on Christian doctrines and practices that showed he was moving away from traditional teachings. Forced to leave the cloister, he took a position as chaplain to the knight Franz von Sickingen at the Ebernburg castle near Mainz. The work proved unfulfilling, however, so when Andreas Cratander, a publisher in Basel for whom he had previously worked, offered him a position as a proofreader, he quickly accepted.

  Meeting him soon after his arrival in Basel, in mid-November 1522, Erasmus was struck by how much he had aged. With his long gray beard, deeply wrinkled face, and emaciated frame, he seemed a patriarch out of the Bible. But the change in his theological outlook was even more pronounced. Whereas before Oecolampadius had treated the Bible as a text in need of editing, he now spoke of it as the binding Word of God. Whereas once he had recognized the dignity of man and his ability to do good works, he now fastened on human sinfulness and divine omnipotence.

  Oecolampadius planned to spend his spare time translating and editing the Church Fathers. Scholarly in temperament and retiring in manner, he felt more comfortable poring over manuscripts than rallying congregations. But it was precisely his gravity and thoughtfulness, along with his deep learning, that appealed to Basel’s reformers. To this point, they had been without a leader, but in Oecolampadius they now felt they had one. He soon began corresponding with Zwingli, and a bond between them quickly developed. The following spring he began lecturing at the university, and not long afterward he would begin preaching at St. Martin’s, Basel’s oldest parish church, which, located in the heart of the business district, offered an ideal podium for spreading his views. After Zwingli, Oecolampadius would become Switzerland’s most prominent reformer (until the coming of Calvin).

  Feeling increasingly vulnerable, Erasmus decided to appeal to the highest authority, the pope, for protection. The support Erasmus had long received from Leo X had proved effective in silencing his conservative critics. In November 1521, however, Leo had caught a fever while at his hunting lodge outside Rome, and within a week he was dead. His successor was none other than Adrian of Utrecht, Erasmus’s fellow countryman and longtime friend.

  The election of Adrian VI had shocked the world—Adrian included. At sixty-two, he was already in his twilight years, and as a non-Italian he was almost completely unknown in Rome. (He would be the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II in 1978.) In 1516, he had accompanied Charles to Spain, where he became the bishop of Tortosa (and, in 1517, a cardinal). Like the other high-ranking Netherlanders in Spain, Adrian had been very unpopular, and he became even more so after his ruthless suppression of the Comunero Revolt. While in Spain, Adrian had established himself as a fierce opponent of Luther and of heresy in general, and he was known for his blameless living. With Rome under attack for its corruption and profligacy, his reputation for rectitude held great appeal, and so in January 1522 the College of Cardinals chose him to guide the Church through this critical passage in its history.

  Erasmus’s ties to Adrian went back to 1502, when Adrian had tried to arrange a lectureship for him in Louvain. Ever since, he had been well disposed toward Erasmus, defending him against the Louvain theologians and welcoming his New Testament. But Adrian had sided with the Dominicans against Reuchlin and endorsed the Louvain-Cologne condemnation of Luther, and Erasmus worried that Stunica and other detractors in Rome would succeed in turning the new pope against him.

  Over the summer of 1522, Erasmus had been working on an edition of a commentary on the Psalms by Arnobius the Younger, a Latin Father of the fifth century, and in an effort to secure Adrian’s support, he decided to dedicate it to him. In his cover letter, Erasmus with the usual flattery noted that the current “tempest in human affairs absolutely demanded a man like you at the helm.” If any hostile reports about him reached the pope’s ears, Erasmus went on, he hoped that Adrian would either dismiss them or at least keep an open mind and wait to hear Erasmus’s defense, for in religious matters he had always shown “the spirit proper to an orthodox Christian, and so I shall do to the day of my death.”

  With Rome some six hundred miles away, Erasmus could expect a reply around mid-September. But September came and went without any word from Rome. October and November similarly passed. Erasmus heard rumors that the pope was displeased with the Arnobius and had pronounced him a heretic and condemned his books. With Christmas approaching and still no reply forthcoming, he decided to send Adrian another appeal. “Most blessed Father,” he wrote, “I send you for the second time, by the public courier of Basel, a token of my devotion to you.” If His Holiness needed proof of his loyalty, he should propose whatever task he might, and unless Erasmus’s obedience was prompt and cheerful, “do not count the name of Erasmus among your servants.”

  In fact, Adrian had gotten Erasmus’s first letter. From the moment of his election, however, his life had been one long tribulation. Shattered by the violence of the Comunero uprising, he now faced the challenge of making the long and dangerous journey to Rome. Because of the fighting between France and Spain, he was unable to travel overland and so had to go by sea. The waters off southern France were so infested with Turkish pirates that a fifty-ship flotilla was thought necessary. Not until August 5, 1522, were Adrian and his armada finally ready to sail. Forced to hug the coast for safety, they did not arrive in Ostia (the port of Rome) until late August. There, Adrian mounted a mule to travel through the mud and heat of the Campagna while his guards looked out for the bands of robbers that roamed the area. As he entered Rome, he was greeted by a gang of naked children who were whipping one another raw. The city had recently been hit by the plague, and most of its curates and aristocrats had fled.

  Those who remained had awaited Adrian’s arrival with great trepidation. The Dutchman’s reputation as a pious bookworm and his reported love of austerity had sown panic among the adventurers, epicures, and aesthetes who packed Rome. His physical appearance seemed to bear out their fears. With his puckered face and tight-fitting cap, Adrian radiated monkish self-denial. He understood no Italian and spoke Latin with a guttural accent that seemed to confirm his barbarian origins. To Adrian, meanwhile, Rome seemed a sinkhole of beggars, buffoons, delinquents, and assassins. Murders took place in the city almost daily, and the right of sanctuary offered by churches and religious houses made it hard to apprehend the perpetrators.

  Because of the plague, Adrian was urged to hold his coronation in St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, but he insisted on using St. Peter’s. The half-finished basilica remained a jumble of stunted columns, marble heaps, and weather-beaten scaffolding. Adrian kept the ceremony simple, with little of the lavish display that had become a staple of Renaissance Rome. It was a signal of how he intended to rule. To stop the spread of Lutheran doctrines, he believed, the Augean stables had to be cleaned. At long last, Rome had a pope genuinely committed to reform.

  In his inaugural speech, delivered on September 1, 1522, Adrian described his top two priorities: mobilizing Christian princes to confront the Turks and purging the Roman Curia. To show his seriousness, he launched a frontal assault on the cardinals, reproaching them for their luxurious living and urging them to limit themselves to an annual income of six thousand ducats. He prohibited them from wearing beards (which were said to make them look like criminals) and barred members of their households from carrying weapons. Moving against absenteeism and pluralism, the pope declared that no one should hold more than one clerical office, and he took steps to end favoritism in the awarding of benefices. Taking aim at the rot at the Datary, he sought to abolish the elaborate schedule of fees for bulls and dispensations. He also set out to re
store the integrity of the papal courts; as an example, a clerk who had given false evidence in a case was arrested and deprived of all of his benefices.

  Seeking to lead by personal example, Adrian dispensed with the swollen staffs maintained by Julius and Leo and relied on an elderly Flemish woman to do his cooking and washing. He liked to eat alone and preferred simple fare to the exotic meats and rich sauces favored by his predecessors. A strict observer of the canonical hours, he turned in early so that he could attend matins, and after returning to bed he was up again by daybreak to say Mass. He moved into a small study in the Vatican, where he spent many hours trying to complete a Scholastic treatise on which he had long labored. Absorbed in his studies, Adrian was difficult to see, and his brusque manner of speaking alienated many in the capital of eloquence.

  The outcry was fierce. “Everyone trembles,” wrote the Venetian ambassador. Rome “has again become what it once was,” and all the cardinals “have put off their beards.” The whole city “is beside itself with fear and terror, owing to the things done by the Pope in the space of eight days.” Adrian himself lived in constant fear of being poisoned, and one officer whose livelihood was threatened tried to stab him.

  The main obstacles to Adrian’s program, though, were the bureaucrats at the Curia. Experts in obstruction and delay, they resisted his every order. In satires, gossip, and dinner-table talk, Adrian was reviled as a miser, a recluse, a Goth. Naive and inexperienced, he had no idea of how to fight back; Rome, he thought, could be transformed into a virtuous place simply through the issuance of a few decrees.

  Still, he soldiered on. By the beginning of October 1522, the plague was claiming as many as thirty-five people a day, and all but one cardinal fled the city, but the Dutch pope with stoic conviction remained at his post. And Rome faced an even graver threat: the Turks. After overrunning Belgrade, in August 1521, the Ottomans took aim at Rhodes. Ruled by the Knights of St. John, that island was the last bastion of Christendom in the eastern Mediterranean and a major obstacle to Muslim expansion there. Determined to take it, Suleiman amassed a fleet of four hundred ships along with a ten-thousand-man army and the provisions for a long siege. On June 26, 1522, it began. Though hopelessly outnumbered, the island’s defenders bravely held out while awaiting reinforcements. They never came, and in December the knights were forced to surrender. When Adrian heard the news, he burst into tears. Reports spread that the Ottomans planned to invade Italy from the Adriatic and push across the peninsula to Rome. At every opportunity, Adrian proclaimed the need for a crusade against the infidels, and he levied new taxes and tithes with the aim of raising a force of fifty thousand men.

  While confronting the Muslims, Adrian was also preparing to repel that other great threat to Western Christendom: Luther. The pope considered him a second Muhammad who was seducing innocent Christians into the arms of false gods. The schism opened up by him had to be closed for collective action to be taken against the Turks; urgent measures were needed to cull the scrofulous sheep from the flock.

  An opportunity to achieve that was presented by the new Imperial Diet, due to begin in Nuremberg on November 17, 1522. Adrian hoped to convince the German estates to fully enforce the Edict of Worms and prohibit Luther’s writings from circulating. The pope planned to couple that plea with a promise to address the abuses in Rome that had so angered the Germans. He chose Francesco Chieregati, a seasoned Italian diplomat whom he had met in Spain, as his envoy to the assembly.

  In addition to enlisting the German princes, Adrian hoped to sway the German people. The letter from Erasmus, with its plea for the pope’s blessing, provided an opening. Given the great prestige the prince of letters continued to enjoy among moderate Germans, a penetrating attack by him could help discredit Luther. To prepare his request, Adrian called on two secretaries, one of whom, remarkably, was Jerome Aleander, Erasmus’s old adversary, who was now back in Rome. Their successive drafts seemed alternately too warm and too cool, and Adrian’s repeated requests for new ones partly explained his delay in replying.

  The final version was friendly but insistent. Addressing Erasmus as “Beloved Son,” Adrian observed that his letters had caused him delight, both because they came from a man of such outstanding learning and because they gave evidence of his “exceptional devotion” to the Catholic faith. As for Erasmus’s fear that malicious gossip would taint him in the pope’s eyes, he should put his mind to rest. At the same time, the affection the pope felt for him and the concern he had for his reputation had impelled him to urge Erasmus to attack the “new heresies” with the literary skill with which providence had so uniquely endowed him. Through this sacred undertaking, Erasmus could most effectively silence the suspicions that had arisen concerning his attitude toward Luther. He must hold back no longer. “Can you then refuse to sharpen the weapon of your pen against the madness of these men?” By them “the whole church of Christ is thrown into confusion, and countless souls are involved together with them in the guilt of eternal damnation.”

  As a sweetener, Adrian invited Erasmus to visit Rome once the plague had lifted. If he did come, Adrian would see to it that he had access to many valuable books in the city as well as conversations with many learned men. On December 1, 1522, the letter was signed and sent north. Adrian was now joining the long list of powerful figures demanding that Erasmus take a public stand against Luther. The pope awaited a response, even as he followed the proceedings of the new diet.

  Nuremberg was one of about sixty-five imperial free cities in the Holy Roman Empire. These cities answered to neither a prince nor a bishop but to the emperor, and in practice they enjoyed considerable autonomy. In the religious competition ahead, they would be key battlegrounds, and few more so than Nuremberg. With a population of 40,000, it was the de facto capital of the empire. Both the Imperial Governing Council and the Imperial Chamber Court were located there, and between 1522 and 1524 the city would host three diets.

  Nuremberg was also the center of the German Renaissance. It was home to Albrecht Dürer, Germany’s most famous artist; to a booming printing industry; and to craftsmen whose skill and ingenuity were admired across the continent. At fairs held three times a year, Nuremberg’s market square filled with stalls offering ornate candelabras, exquisite timepieces, precise scientific instruments, guns of every caliber, bells of all sizes, the sturdiest tools, the finest musical instruments, and the most secure locks in Europe.

  Nuremberg was known as well for its effective governance. Like most imperial cities, it was ruled by a small elite, with a council dominated by several dozen patrician families whose main interest was maintaining social and economic stability. Strict controls were placed on every aspect of civic life. Sumptuary laws regulated the length of men’s jackets, the cut of women’s bodices, the types of cakes that could be served at weddings, and the number of candles that could be lit at funerals. A battalion of inspectors policed every aspect of economic life, from the baking of bread and the labeling of wine to the freshness of meat and the purchase of raw materials. In Nuremberg (in contrast to most other cities), pigs were not allowed to forage freely in the streets; once a day they could be driven to the Pegnitz River, which flowed through town, and their droppings had to be scooped up at once and thrown into its turgid waters. Inns had to close at sunset, and when the curfew bell rang two hours later, anyone found outdoors without a valid reason was detained.

  Yet even in this highly regimented setting, Luther’s ideas were spreading. Their main conduit was the Sodalitas Staupitziana, a circle of reform-minded clergy, scholars, and civic leaders named after Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s early mentor. As vicar-general of the Augustinian Observants, Staupitz had frequently passed through Nuremberg on his visitations, and he sometimes stayed over to preach at the Augustinian church. His pronouncements on the sinfulness of man and the need for divine grace made a deep impression, and a group of leading citizens began meeting at the Augustinian friary. They included Dürer; Willibald Pirckheimer, Nure
mberg’s leading humanist; and Lazarus Spengler, the secretary of the town council. Through the Augustinian prior, Wenceslas Link, the Sodalitas members learned of Luther’s pathbreaking lectures on the Bible even before he had issued the Ninety-Five Theses. Reading that justification comes through faith alone, these men felt freed from the uncertainty and anxiety associated with penance and works; reading and interpreting the Bible on their own, they felt empowered to confront the priesthood and its authority.

  In 1522, one member of the sodality, Andreas Osiander, who taught Hebrew at the Augustinian monastery, was appointed preacher at St. Lorenz, one of the city’s two parish churches. His powerful sermons about the importance of faith over works and of God’s Word over man-made laws attracted large crowds. In three other Nuremberg churches as well, reform-minded preachers gained control of pulpits. Churchgoers began disrupting the sermons of more traditional preachers, and fast days were flagrantly violated by craftsmen and journeymen.

  The Meistersinger were another vehicle for spreading Luther’s ideas. Nuremberg had about two hundred of these master singers, who, joining poetry to music, followed an elaborate code of rules developed over centuries. They performed in public three times a year but met more frequently in the church of the convent of St. Catherine’s for highly structured singing contests, with a judge ready to sanction any singer who strayed even minutely from the rules.

  When Luther’s teachings began circulating in Nuremberg, the Meistersinger quickly incorporated them into their songs. The most nimble was Hans Sachs. Educated at a Latin school and trained as a shoemaker, Sachs worked at that trade for years before discovering a knack for putting words to melodies and communicating ideas through music. On discovering Luther, around 1520, he began celebrating Luther’s gospel in catchy poems and songs. Astonishingly prolific, Sachs over his lifetime would produce more than four thousand master songs, two hundred or more dramas, and some two thousand didactic poems in rhyming couplets, plus assorted dialogues, tales, and fables, many of them heralding the new gospel. (Sachs is the central character in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.)