by Tom Wheeler
An indulgence was a medieval “get-out-of-jail free” card. Since the Church controlled each person’s relationship with God, getting right with the Church would get you right with God. One way to get right with the Church was with cash.
The Catholic Church badly needed cash in the early sixteenth century. Pope Leo X—the first of the Medici popes and the last pontiff who was not a priest—had reportedly remarked, “Since God has given us the Papacy, let us enjoy it.”8 Two years of such enjoyment was all it took for the new pope to deplete the Vatican’s treasury. Yet demands on that treasury continued, not the least of which was the need to finish building St. Peter’s Basilica.
The pope’s liquidity crisis happened to coincide with the archbishop of Mainz’s desire to expand his power by adding a third bishopric to his realm. While it was technically against church law to have a third bishopric, the pope could, of course, provide dispensation from the rules. A deal was consummated. The archbishop enriched the Vatican’s coffers by 10,000 ducats (an amount allegedly made holy by using the same base number as the Ten Commandments), and the pope granted dispensation.9
To raise the necessary funds, the archbishop sold letters of indulgence to his flock. The indulgences were a well-established money-raising scheme that dated to the Crusades whereby the Church could fill its coffers by allowing individuals to purchase their way out of Purgatory. This time, however, the archbishop improved on that formula. To ensure his fundraising success, the archbishop expanded the power of the certificate retroactively. It became possible not only to purchase protection for yourself but also to purchase a release from Purgatory for the deceased.
“Can you hear your dead relatives screaming out in Purgatory while you fiddle away your money?” went the sales pitch. One particularly theatrical monk even devised a little ditty to promote his sales activities:
When a coin in the coffer rings,
a soul from Purgatory springs.10
That kind of powerful sales pitch meant that a large supply of indulgences would be needed. Such orders for indulgences were a godsend to commercial printers. Long runs of a simple document were a printer’s most profitable work. Best of all, the entire output sold at once to a single buyer. These indulgences were produced in massive amounts; by one estimate, the number of indulgences printed throughout Europe for this and other money-raising campaigns climbed into the hundreds of thousands.11
But what was manna from heaven for the printers was an anathema to Martin Luther. In the quiet of the monastery and the intellectual stimulation of the classroom, Luther had been privately exploring the concept of reaching God without the intervention of the Church.
The sale of indulgences caused Luther to go public with his thoughts. Appalled by the profiteering of a church that sold God’s grace for cash, Luther first went through appropriate channels and wrote to the archbishop. Of course, it was the archbishop who was using indulgence revenue to expand his realm. Shut out, the monk nailed his theses to the church door.
Attaching a challenge to the Church on the door of its house of worship was less a symbolic confrontation than a simple posting on a community bulletin board. The church door was pockmarked with holes from other such postings placed there as a means of beginning a discussion among the local academic community.12
It was no wonder that the pope was unconcerned. Since the theses were written in Latin, only the well educated would understand them. Furthermore, exposure to the heresy would be physically limited to those in Wittenberg.
This time, however, the ink hit the press. Within fifteen days Luther’s theses, translated from Latin into the German language of the masses, were available in every part of Germany.13
The monk had met his medium.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century there were commercial printers in sixty German towns. Elsewhere throughout Europe, similar infrastructure was being built.14 Like any other commercial entity, these printers were constantly searching for new products to produce and sell. Modern history is replete with examples of newspapers churning up controversy to sell their product. The incentive was no different in the sixteenth century. Luther’s ideas fit the printers’ demand equation perfectly.15
The no-longer-obscure monk and his work became a profit machine for commercial printers. Following up on the best-selling flyers describing the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther sent to the presses the “Sermon on Grace and Indulgences,” further explaining his ideas. This direct-to-the-presses attack on indulgences became Luther’s biggest hit, being reprinted in fourteen editions in 1518 and another eight in 1519–20.16
Having found both his voice and his vehicle, Luther became prolific. The year after his theses, he published eighteen new works, most in the language of the people. By writing in German rather than in clerical Latin, Luther greatly expanded the audience for his message and thus for the printers’ output. Soon he was even releasing a Bible written entirely in the native tongue, so the people could interpret God’s word for themselves. The first edition of the New Testament in German (1522) sold out in a matter of weeks. In the following two years eighty editions were published throughout Germany.17
“The indulgences market collapsed like a popped dot-com,” one modern observer commented.18 The printers for whom the Church had been a mainstay of business could not have cared less, however. By one account, one-third of all the books printed in Germany from 1518 to 1525 were the product of Martin Luther’s pen.19
Reassembling the Old to Create the New
It is a wonder that the printing press that gave Luther his medium ever came to be.
For centuries, mankind had been on the precipice of printing. The components necessary for the movable-type printing press were all present in one form or another in the fifteenth century. Their assembly, however, was a medieval Rubik’s Cube of permutations and combinations.
The screw press was not new. As early as the Roman era, presses had been used to squeeze grapes and olives for their juice.
The assembling of individual characters, cut in reverse and inked to create an impression, had been used by the Chinese since the eleventh century. While the idea had not reached Europe, it was nonetheless clearly within human comprehension.
Inexpensive paper had come to Europe in the twelfth century from Arab countries, where the techniques for its production had been learned from Chinese prisoners four centuries earlier.
Ink had been around since the development of writing. Mixing carbon soot with various liquids to produce a mark was far from revolutionary.
While all of these preexisting capabilities had never been brought together, the printing press was more than their simple amalgam. Solving one part of the puzzle had the effect of opening the door to another problem. Conceptualizing how these basic techniques could work in harmony to enable mechanized printing was a sizable intellectual hurdle. Actually accomplishing that synergy was made infinitely more difficult by the need to adjust each technique so it would work with the others.
The press had to do more than apply a squeezing pressure. The pressure had to be delivered uniformly throughout; otherwise some text would be lighter or less sharp than others.
The individual characters had to be consistent in size and shape. Yes, the Chinese were the first to cut their characters into molds (first for clay characters and eventually for metal type), but the results were not uniform, and each character emerged from the mold with its own idiosyncrasies.
Most paper was too thin and too absorbent for printing on both sides. Imagine trying to print consistently on something similar to bathroom tissue!
The water-based ink ran off the metal type to which it needed to adhere.
The compounded challenge of solving the base problem of the press, paper, ink, and type and then making them all work in concert was the decade-plus quest of a German goldsmith named Johannes Gensfleisch Gutenberg.20 The magnitude of his challenge and the revolutionary concepts he was developing are revealed by the records of a 1439 lawsuit
.
Gutenberg’s concept was so bold, and the process to accomplish it so revolutionary, that in 1438 he and three others entered into a contract that swore each of them to secrecy. What they called the “secret art” was so special that the contract further provided that should one of the partners die, his heirs would have no access to the secrets.
Within a year, the plague had claimed one of the partners.
As the partners had feared, the deceased’s siblings tried to force their way into knowledge about and an ownership share of the “secret art.” As part of this effort they filed suit. A trial was conducted to determine whether the brothers of the dead partner could claim his share. The records of the trial forge the link between Gutenberg and the discovery of the movable-type printing press.21 The records also display the extent to which Gutenberg went to protect the results of his work.
While the witnesses tried to obfuscate exactly what was going on, it appears Gutenberg’s secret art was his early effort to resolve the interlinked issues necessary for a movable-type printing press. It was a secret so profound that when the partnership was threatened by the legal action, Gutenberg ordered the destruction of his hard work lest the prototypes fall into the wrong hands.
Johannes Gutenberg had been born into the emerging medieval middle class of craftsmen. His father was a goldsmith, a “Companion of the Mint” in Mainz, Germany, where he produced coinage. Johannes followed in his father’s footsteps to learn the art of working with metals.
The son was a skilled craftsman. He was also an entrepreneur in an age when entrepreneurs were building a new middle class. One of his many business activities—the buying and selling of wine—put him in proximity to the screw press used for squeezing wine grapes. A failed business undertaking, which probably also used a screw press, gave him further exposure to working with molten metal and produced the partnership that ended up in court.
The original business idea of the partners had nothing to do with printing. It was a simple plan to exploit the traditions of the Catholic Church. Because the holy relics of the Church cemented the clergy’s links to the saints and even to Christ, the Church would unveil the relics on special occasions. The faithful were told that gazing upon those artifacts connected the viewer to the powers they represented. As a result, the unveiling of such relics became grand occasions that stimulated great pilgrimages.
One of the greatest pilgrimages of medieval times was to Aachen (about 160 miles northwest of present-day Strasbourg, France) to see the remains of the sainted Charlemagne, the swaddling clothes of the baby Jesus, the loincloth of the crucified Christ, and other purported memorabilia.22 The Aachen relics were exhibited once every seven years. For the two weeks of their display, upward of 10,000 pilgrims per day would gather to gaze upon them from afar. During the 1432 pilgrimage the belief developed that if a convex mirror was held so as to capture the relics’ reflected image, it would absorb and store their radiant powers. To Gutenberg, that belief was an economic opportunity.
Living at the time in St. Arbogast, outside Strasbourg, Gutenberg developed a plan to manufacture and sell such mirrors for the 1439 pilgrimage. Making a mirror was difficult, making a convex mirror more so. In these challenges, however, Gutenberg was served well by his experience in the family trade of working with metals. To raise the capital necessary to purchase and fabricate the raw materials, he took in three partners.
Unfortunately, as happens to so many business plans, the fates conspired against its success. The 1439 pilgrimage was canceled because of the spread of the plague. Gutenberg and his partners were left with an inventory of raw material and partially completed trinkets.
The partnership, however, held together. Whether the work on the trinket mirrors opened some insight into what became movable-type printing can only be speculated (it did, after all, involve bending the shape with a press and creating a mirror using molten metal, both skills important to making movable type practicable). Nonetheless, something happened to encourage the partners to enter into a new five-year contract and invest further funds. It was that contract that was being adjudicated in order to protect the secret art.
When the court found in favor of Gutenberg, it was a two-pronged victory. First, the interlopers were kept out and Gutenberg’s group was able to buy back the deceased partner’s share at cost. Second, any of the witnesses who may have known what Gutenberg was up to held their tongues and spoke only in the most circumspect manner. Testimony documented, nonetheless, that Gutenberg was doing something that involved a press, smelting of metal, “formes,” and “four pieces” held together by “two screws.”23
Gutenberg fulfilled his partnership obligation and stayed in Strasbourg for its five-year term. During that period the fits and starts of his exploration continued, but the great breakthrough did not occur. At the end of the agreement he left town.
By 1448, Gutenberg was back in Mainz, the city of his birth, about two days north on the Rhine River from Strasbourg. For over a decade he had been patiently playing with the Rubik’s Cube of diverse pieces necessary for the mastery of movable type. In Mainz it all came together.
What passed for printing in fifteenth-century Europe was the use of blocks of wood into which the letters and pictures of an entire page had been laboriously carved. Blotting this woodcut against a piece of paper produced a complete page.24 The problem with the process, however, was the labor-intensive carving of the woodblock and the imperfect reproduction that resulted from blotting.
The idea of seeing the page not in its entirety but as a collection of smaller pieces of information was an intellectual breakthrough in Western thought.25 Beyond that breakthrough, however, the problem remained how to make a collection of identical type and lash the pieces together to produce the same result as a woodcut.
Carving a relief letter on the head of a punch was a well-known method used for embossing the leather covers of manuscripts and making impressions in the dies that struck coins. Because the letters were each carved by hand, however, they were not uniform. The labor-intensive handcrafting of each letter also limited the scale at which the letters could be produced.
Taking such a punch and driving it into a softer metal would produce a shape, called a matrix, which could then be filled with molten metal to produce a copy of the shape. This could have solved the scaling problem but for the fact that metal contracts as it cools, and thus each letter from the matrix came out slightly different. Further compounding the complexities of using a matrix was that small variations in its creation were reproduced in its product. The angle at which the punch hit the matrix and the force of the blow that set the matrix’s impression affected the shape of the type it produced, differentiating it from the desired consistency.26
Even if these problems were solved, Gutenberg still had to come up with solutions to such thorny issues as the varying widths of letters. Clearly, the letter m is wider than the letter i, and a capital M is wider than a lowercase m. Yet when the letters were all bound together, the spaces between the letters had to appear uniform.
No wonder Gutenberg had been laboring against these challenges for a decade or more of trial and error. And creating the type itself was just part of the problem. Gutenberg struggled to achieve other breakthroughs necessary for his idea to work.
The evolution of medieval underwear helped solve one of Gutenberg’s related problems.27 Wool undergarments had clothed the populace since the beginning of haberdashery. Around the twelfth century, however, linen was substituted for wool. To its wearers, that in and of itself must have seemed a great leap forward. The shift had the unintended effect, however, of initiating a rag trade of discarded linen, which became a plentiful and low-cost source of raw material for paper.28
A decline in the price and increase in the quality of paper was helpful, yet the physical qualities of the paper presented their own problems. Because of its fragile consistency, the surface of early paper had to be treated to make it harder and more impervious to ink lea
king through to the other side. That hardening, while fine for the scribes’ quills and ink, inhibited the paper from accepting the ink from the press. More trial and error revealed that moist paper would evenly absorb the ink from the type. The problem then became determining the correct amount of moisture and developing a process for both moistening the pages before printing and drying each page and its inked impression afterward.29
The solution: the dampening of every other sheet in a stack of paper before putting the whole lot under a press would allow the moisture to leach from wet to dry pages. Like so many of Gutenberg’s “solutions,” this advance led to a new set of challenges. Paper could stay moist for only a finite period before it began disintegrating and losing its strength. The length of time it could stay moist without damage changed constantly as a result of changes in the barometric pressure outside the printing shop.
Then there was the problem of the ink. The ink used by scribes was plentiful, but the viscosity that enabled it to flow smoothly out of a quill meant it similarly ran off the metal type. Once again, painstaking trial and error afforded a solution. What Gutenberg needed was an oily ink that would stick. He found his solution in the varnish-like paint used by Flemish artists. The mixture of lampblack soot, boiled linseed oil, heated lead, and copper oxide stuck to the type.
Getting that ink onto the type was yet another challenge requiring a new solution. How could the new ink be applied so that it didn’t fill the holes in letters such as b or e? For this Gutenberg developed ink balls. Looking like half a grapefruit stuffed with wool or hair on a stick, the ink balls were doused in a tray of ink and then wiped over the type to deliver an even coating that adhered only to the top of the type pieces and didn’t run down into the holes.30