A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  However, their clergy were to prove neither corrupt nor depraved, and this, in that age, was refreshing. At a time when homicide, thievery, rape, and assassination reached shocking heights, loyal Catholics were most deeply distressed by the abuses of their own clergymen. Many of the clergy agreed. Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim condemned his own monks: “The whole day is spent in filthy talk; their whole time is given to play and gluttony. … They neither fear nor love God; they have no thought of the life to come, preferring their fleshly lusts to the needs of the soul. … They scorn the vow of poverty, know not that of chastity, revile that of obedience. … The smoke of their filth ascends all around.” Another monk noted that “many convents … differ little from public brothels.” According to Durant, Guy Jouenneaux, a papal emissary sent to inspect the Benedictine monasteries of France in 1503, described the monks as foulmouthed gamblers and lechers who “live the life of Bacchanals” and “are more worldly than the mere worldling. … Were I minded to relate all those things that have come under my own eyes, I should make too long a tale of it.”

  In England Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Morton accused Abbot William of St. Albans of “simony, usury, embezzlement and living publicly and continuously with harlots and mistresses within the precincts of the monastery and without,” and accused the country’s monks of leading “a life of lasciviousness … nay, of defiling the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous intercourse with nuns,” making a neighborhood priory “a public brothel.” The bishop of Torcello wrote: “The morals of the clergy are corrupt; they have become an offense to the laity.”

  The public perception of the priesthood was in fact appalling. Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador in England, wrote the emperor: “Nearly all the people hate the priests.” A Cambridge professor observed that “Englishmen, if called monk, priest, or clerk, felt bitterly insulted.” Everywhere, wrote William Durand, bishop of Mende, the Church “is in ill repute, and all cry and publish it abroad that within her bosom all men, from the greatest even unto the least, have set their hearts upon covetousness. … That the whole Christian folk take from the clergy pernicious examples of gluttony is clear and notorious, since the clergy feast more luxuriously … than princes and kings.” In Vienna the priesthood had once been the objective of ambitious youths. But now, on the eve of the religious revolt, it had attracted no recruits for twenty years.

  In his fourteen-volume History of the Popes, Ludwig Pastor concludes that it was virtually impossible to exaggerate the “contempt and hatred of the laity for the degenerate clergy.” Philip Hughes, historian of the Reformation in England, found that in 1514, when the chancellor of the bishop of London was accused of murdering a heretic, the bishop asked Cardinal Wolsey to prevent a trial by jury because Londoners were “so maliciously set in favor of heretical pravity that they will … condemn my clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.” Even Pope Leo, who, one would have thought, might have felt some responsibility for scandals committed in the name of the Church, observed in 1516, “The lack of rule in the monasteries of France and the immodest life of the monks have come to such a pitch that neither kings, princes, nor the faithful have any respect for them.”

  Priests by the thousands found it impossible to live in celibacy. Their solutions varied. In London it was not unknown for women entering the confessional box to be offered absolution in exchange for awkward, cramped intercourse on the spot. In Norfolk, Ripton, and Lambeth, 23 percent of the men indicted for sex crimes against women were clerics, though they constituted less than 2 percent of the population. The most common solution for men unable to bear the strain of continence was to take a mistress. Virtually all German priests kept women. The Roman clergy had a reputation for promiscuity, “but it is a mistake,” writes Pastor, “to assume that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere; there is documentary evidence of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula. … No wonder, as contemporary writers sadly testify, the influence of the clergy had declined, and in many places hardly any respect was shown for the priesthood.”

  There was trouble in the convents, too. The problem seems to have been especially distressing in England. In 1520 eight nunneries there were closed, one because of “the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University.” After an examination of twenty-one convents in the diocese of Lincoln, fourteen were blacklisted for “lack of discipline or devotion.” In several, nuns had been found who had been made pregnant by priests. Two reports told of prioresses living in adultery. A diocesan commission filed a separate account of one abbess who had presented a local blacksmith with three sons.

  The failure of pontiffs to set a good example was heavily blamed. Egidio of Viterbo, general of the Augustinians, summed up Pope Alexander’s Rome in nine words: “No law, no divinity; Gold, force and Venus rule.” Guicciardini wrote: “Reverence for the Papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men.” In 1513 Machiavelli charged that there could be no greater proof of papal “decadence than the fact that the nearer people are to the Roman Church, the head of their religion, the less religious they are. And whoever examines the principles on which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is near at hand.”

  IT WAS PRECISELY four years away, and the spark which ignited it was the sale of indulgences—specifically, the conduct of the quaestiarii, or pardoners, commissioned to distribute them, and the avarice of the papacy. Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford, noted in 1450 that “sinners say nowadays: “I care not how many evils I do in God’s sight, for I can easily get plenary remission of all guilt and penalty by an absolution and indulgence granted me by the pope, whose written grant I have bought for four or six pence.” The “indulgence-mongers,” as Gascoigne scornfully called the quaestiarii in his account, “wander all over the country, and give a letter of pardon, sometimes for two pence, sometimes for a draught of wine or beer … or even for the hire of a harlot, or for carnal love.”

  John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the early sixteenth century, concluded that the commercialization of indulgences had transformed the Church into a “money machine.” He quoted Isaiah: “The faithful city is become a harlot”—no one could doubt which city he meant—and then Jeremiah: “She hath committed fornication with many lovers. … She hath conceived many seeds of iniquity, and daily bringeth forth the foulest of offspring.” He said, “Covetousness also … has so taken possession of the hearts of all priests … that nowadays we are blind to everything but that alone which seems able to bring us gain.” In effect, the practice of indulgences was a form of religious taxation, and its weight bore heavily on those who could least afford it. Informed Christians deeply resented the gulf between Europe’s hungry masses and Rome’s greed. In 1502 a procurer-general of the Parlement estimated that the Catholic hierarchy owned 75 percent of all the money in France; twenty years later, when the Diet of Nuremberg drew up its Centum Gravamina—Hundred Grievances—the Church was credited with owning 50 percent of the wealth in Germany.

  Peter and Saul (later Paul) had lived in penury. The popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lived like Roman emperors. They were the wealthiest men in the world, and they and their cardinals further enriched themselves by selling holy offices. An ecclesiastical appointee had to send the Curia half his income during the first year of his appointment, and a tenth of it each year thereafter. Archbishops paid huge lump sums for their pallia, the white bands which served as the insignia of their rank. When Catholic officeholders died, all their personal possessions went to Rome. Judgments and dispensations rendered by the Curia became official when the applicant sent a gift in acknowledgment, with the Curia fixing the size of the gift. And every Christian was subject to papal taxes.

  Even before he bought his pontificate, C
ardinal Rodrigo Borgia’s income had been 70,000 florins a year. But an occupant of Saint Peter’s chair could do much better than that. Pope Julius

  The traffic in indulgences

  II formed a “college” of 101 secretaries who each paid him 7,400 florins for the honor. Leo X, more ambitious, created 141 squires and 60 chamberlains in his papal household, and, in return, received 202,000 florins.

  Archbishops, bishops—even lower orders of the clergy—grew fat and frequently supported concubines on their fees and tithes. The laity had first protested their systematic impoverishment in the fourteenth century. Germans had seized tax collectors from Rome, jailed them, mutilated many, executed some. There, and elsewhere, brave prelates had supported the people. One, Alvaro Pelayo of Spain, declared: “Wolves are in control of the Church and feed on [Christian] blood!” another, Bishop Durand of Mende, demanded that “the Church of Rome” remove “evil examples from herself … by which men are scandalized, and the whole people, as it were, infected.”

  The Vatican was unmoved. Over the years it had increased its levies, and that continued. In 1476 Pope Sixtus IV had proclaimed that indulgences applied to souls suffering in purgatory. This celestial confidence trick was an immediate success; David S. Schiff has described how peasants starved their families and themselves to buy relief for departed relatives. Discontent was growing when the wasteful Pope Leo found himself broke—undone by his war against the Duchy of Urbino. Going to the well once too often, on March 15, 1517, the Holy Father announced a “special” sale of indulgences. The purpose of this “jubilee” bargain (feste dies), as he called it, was to rebuild St. Peter’s basilica. As an incentive donors would receive, not only “complete absolution and remission of all sins,” but also “preferential treatment for their future sins.”

  There was, understandably, no mention of a secret agreement under which the Curia would split the jubilee’s profits with young Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, who was deeply in debt to Germany’s merchant family, the Fuggers. Albrecht had the pontiff’s sympathy, and he was entitled to it. Albrecht had been obliged to borrow 20,000 florins because that was the price the pope had exacted for his confirmation as prelate.

  The new archbishop chose as his jubilee’s principal agent and hawker one Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar in his fifties. There were quaestiarii whose traffic in indulgences was scrupulous, but Tetzel was not among them. He was a sort of medieval P. T. Barnum who traveled from village to village with a brass-bound chest, a bag of printed receipts, and an enormous cross draped with the papal banner. Accompanying him were a Fugger accountant and another friar, an assistant carrying a velvet cushion bearing Leo’s bull of indulgence. Their entrance into a town square was heralded by the ringing of church bells. Jugglers performed and local throngs crowded around, waving candles, flags, and relics.

  Setting up in the nave of the local church, Tetzel would begin his pitch by opening the bag and calling out, “I have here the passports … to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of Paradise.” The fees were dirt-cheap, he pointed out, if they considered the alternatives. Christians who had committed a mortal sin owed God seven years’ penance. “Who then,” he asked, “would hesitate for a quarter-florin to secure one of these letters of remission?” Anything could be forgiven, he assured them, anything. He gave an example. Suppose a youth had slipped into his mother’s bed

  St. Peter’s Square in Rome at the time of the coronation of Pope Sixtus V, in 1585.

  and spent his seed inside her. If that boy put the right coins in the pontiff’s bowl, “the Holy Father has the power in heaven and earth to forgive that sin, and if he forgives it, God must do so also.” Warming up, Tetzel even appealed to the survivors of men who had gone to their graves unshriven: “As soon as the coin rings in the bowl, the soul for whom it is paid will fly out of purgatory and straight to heaven.”

  In Germany Tetzel exceeded his quota. He always did. This was his profession; he traveled from one diocese to another, raising funds as instructed by the Curia. Indulgences were popular among the peasantry, but less so among those who, in those days, formed the opinions of the laity. And this time he was in hostile territory. Northeastern Germany—Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and Mainz—had been chosen for this extortion because it was weak. France, Spain, and England were strong, and when they had asked that little be expected of them, pleading poverty, the pontiff had agreed. The decision was not without risk. Antipapal feeling was strong and vocal in Germany. The papal nuncio to the Holy Roman Empire was worried. That part of the Reich, he had written the pope, was in an ugly mood. He had therefore urged cancellation of the jubilee.

  Leo had ignored him—unwisely, for presently ominous signs appeared. After watching Tetzel perform, a local Franciscan friar wrote: “It is incredible what this ignorant monk said and preached. He gave sealed letters stating that even the sins a man was intending to commit would be forgiven. The pope, he said, had more power than all the Apostles, all the angels and saints, more even than the Virgin Mary herself, for these were all subjects of Christ, but the pope was equal to Christ.” Another eyewitness quoted the moneyraiser as declaring that even if a man had violated the Mother of God the indulgence would wipe away his sin.

  Nevertheless, Tetzel was probably acting within the letter of his archiepiscopal instructions, and he would have emerged triumphant once more had he not crossed, or at least approached, a political line. That was the boundary of Saxony, then ruled by Frederick III, also known variously as Frederick the Wise and, because he was among the privileged few entitled to choose a new Holy Roman emperor, as elector of Saxony. Frederick was no less reverent than other rulers of his time, no less superstitious — he had collected nineteen thousand saintly relics in Wittenberg’s Castle Church—and, until now, no critic of quaestiarii. However, accounts of Tetzel’s extravagant claims had troubled him. He wanted to keep Saxon coins in Saxon pockets. Therefore he had declared the friar and his jubilee sale non grata in his territory. That was where the peddler of paradise passports blundered. He knew he wasn’t wanted in Frederick’s domain, but while working the dioceses of Meissen, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt he came so close to the border that some Saxons crossed over and bought his divine wares.

  Frederick was indignant. He considered this an affront. Of far greater moment, several of these Saxon customers brought their “papal letters” to a slender, tonsured monk of grave aspect and hard eyes—Martin Luther—asking him, as a professor at Wittenberg, to judge their authenticity. After careful study Luther pronounced them frauds. Word of this reached Tetzel. He made inquiries. The professor, he was told—correctly—had no intention of offending the Church. Luther was an ardent Catholic, though inclined, as an academic, to draw nice distinctions. Such a man, Tetzel decided, would be easy to intimidate. Therefore, in the most momentous decision of his life—and one of the most momentous in the history of Christianity—he formally denounced him.

  TETZEL BECAME the most famous man to misjudge Professor Martin Luther, but he was far from the first. Luther had always been difficult. Few were close to him, and none—including, perhaps, Luther himself—understood the tumultuous forces within him. His genius is unquestioned. He had begun as an Augustinian friar. In 1505, at the age of twenty-two, he was lecturing on the ethics of Aristotle, using the original Greek text. Two years later he was consecrated a priest, and the year after that, though he continued to regard himself as a friar or monk, he was appointed by Frederick to the chair of professor of philosophy at Wittenberg, on the Elbe, about sixty miles southwest of Berlin. Later in his career he translated both the Old and New Testaments into New High German, a language he virtually created, and composed forty-one hymns, for which he wrote both the words and music. The most memorable of these, still sung around the world, is “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

  In his early years Luther’s loyalty to the Vatican was total; when he first glimpsed the Eternal City in 1511, he fell to his knees crying, “Hail to thee, O hol
y Rome!” He was already admired as a priest of narrow strength who had risen to early eminence as much by force of character as by intellect. Nevertheless, deep within him lurked a dark, irrational, half-mad streak of violence. This flaw, and it was a flaw, may be explained by his origins, which lay in the ignorant, superstition-ridden depths of medieval society. Luther was the product of a terrifying Teutonic childhood which would have broken most men.

  He had been born in 1483, the son of a Mohra peasant who became a Mansfield miner, a husky, hardworking, frugal, humorless, choleric anticleric who loathed the Church yet believed in hell—which, in his imagination, existed as a frightening underworld toward which men were driven by cloven-footed demons, elves, goblins, satyrs, ogres, and witches, and from which they could be rescued only by benign spirits. It was Hans Luther’s conviction that these good witches rarely interceded, though occasionally they could be propitiated by men living lives of relentless, joyless virtue.

  Since children were born wicked, as Hans believed, it was virtuous to beat them senseless with righteous cudgels. However, Martin, the eldest of seven children, was never a submissive victim. He was not strong enough to overpower his father, but when the thrashings entered the realm of sadism, the two became, as he later recalled, open enemies. He received no sympathy from his mother. Though more timid, less irascible, and less worldly than her husband—she spent hours on her knees, praying to obscure saints—she shared Hans’s convictions, including his belief in the salubrious effect of a vigorously applied lash. On one occasion, according to Luther, she caught him stealing a nut and whipped him to a bloody pulp.