Out of the Flames Read online

  What Erasmus had that nobody else had, at least to that degree and in print, was wit. He was the Oscar Wilde of his time. One of his most hilarious and telling satires is a skit that finds the aggressive soldier-pope Julius II, whom Erasmus had met and couldn't stand, confronting Saint Peter at the pearly gates:

  Julius: Open, I say!

  St. Peter: You must show your merits first…

  Julius: What do you mean by merits?…

  St. Peter: What did you do?

  Julius: I raised the revenue. I invented new offices and sold them… I recoined the money and made a great sum that way. Nothing can be done without money… I set all the princes of Europe by the ears. I tore up treaties, and kept great armies in the field. I covered Rome with palaces… I wanted the duchy of Ferrara for a son of my own…

  St. Peter: What? Popes with wives and children?

  Julius: Wives? No, not wives, but why not children?…

  St. Peter: Is there no way to removing a wicked pope?… Not for murder?

  Julius: No, not even if it were parricide.

  St. Peter: Not for fornication?

  Julius: Not for incest.

  St. Peter: Not for poisoning?

  Julius: No, nor for sacrilege…

  St. Peter: You pretend to be a Christian, you are no better than a Turk; you think like a Turk, you are as licentious as a Turk If there is any difference you are worse…

  Julius: Then you won't open the gates?

  As lacerating as Erasmus's wit could be, he knew how to hold himself short of an outright break with Rome. He never entered into the realm of serious theological debate, never questioned the fundamental tenets of the religion. Still, his work was read everywhere, and his pleas for reform and tolerance gained favor all over Europe. One prominent Oxford bookseller in 1520 said that one-third of his sales were of books by Erasmus.

  Although he worked his entire life to promote reform within the Church, through one of his works he indirectly precipitated one of the great schisms in ecclesiastic history. In 1516, Erasmus completed a new edition of the New Testament, working solely from manuscripts, revising the Greek text and offering his own Latin translation. This translation included Erasmus's comments on errors, omissions, and, most significantly, unauthorized additions in Saint Jerome's fourth-century Vulgate. Erasmus's work cast doubt on the authenticity of some extremely key passages, including 1 John 5:7, which stated, “For there are three that bear witness in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: And these three are One.” This passage was generally cited as biblical justification for the Trinity, but the original Greek manuscripts from which Erasmus worked lacked this verse entirely and so he omitted it from his translation.

  Although he had intended it as a scholarly reference, because of his immense reputation Erasmus's version of the New Testament was translated into almost all the vernacular languages and read throughout the Christian world.

  MIGUEL SERVETO QUICKLY outgrew the educational resources available to him in a small town. When he was thirteen, his father sent him to the university in Zaragossa, the capital of Aragon, about seventy miles southwest of Villanueva de Sijena. It wasn't long after he arrived that he came to the attention of the single most important member of the faculty: Juan de Quintana.

  Quintana was a man whose experiences had led him far beyond the provincialism of a regional university in Spain. He had been educated at Paris and had survived the two-decade-long process required to earn a doctorate in theology. Quintana had also traveled across Europe, only recently returning to Spain from France, and his presence at Zaragossa was a major coup for the university. He was also appointed to be a member of the Cortes, the local ruling body, and was certainly the most educated man in the province. What Quintana did not bother to mention to the authorities in theologically conservative Zaragossa was that while he was out of the country studying, he had become a humanist and an admirer of Erasmus.

  Quintana latched on to Miguel Serveto. He made him his personal secretary, effectively removing him from the student body for a private course of study and exposing him to source materials that were unavailable to the rest of the university. As a result, Miguel, now fourteen, began to study not only the assigned texts but, without fanfare, the classics and the humanists as well. And, of course, since he was being encouraged to absorb as much contemporary learning as he could, Miguel also read the books of a German monk named Luther.

  A MORE UNLIKELY CANDIDATE for revolutionary hero status than Martin Luther would be hard to imagine. The son of peasants, Luther showed no particular ability at learning while growing up. In fact, so ignorant, superstitious, and timid was he that when a lightning bolt struck a tree near him he took it as a sign from God and hotfooted it into a monastery.

  Luther took his vows seriously. He worried whether he was saying his prayers properly. He worried whether he was learning enough. He worried whether he was worthy of being God's representative. This character trait was well suited to life at the monastery. Because he worried whether he was being a good monk, Luther outmonked everyone else, spending longer hours saying his prayers, doing penance, fasting, and, most importantly, reading Scripture. “I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I,” he said later.

  In 1510, as a reward for all that monkery, Luther was given the opportunity to visit Rome on behalf of his monastery.

  This was the Renaissance, and Pope Julius II, when he was not putting on his armor and conquering Italian cities like Bologna, was in the process of making Rome a monument to himself by sponsoring vast artistic and architectural projects. All of this campaigning and art, as well as the general upkeep of the Papal States and the replacement of older cathedrals, required financing, and for years that financing had come from the pockets of the common people of Europe.

  At the time, the Church had perfected a sort of spiritual point system. If a person sinned, he or she could go to purgatory. It was possible, however, by visitation to relics (contribution required) or the purchase of indulgences, to buy back one's time in this undesirable location until assured a place in heaven. Still, it was impossible to know just how many years God had assigned to any individual sinner. Since Rome held more relics in one place than all other locations combined, a sinner making a pilgrimage there had the greatest chance of avoiding posthumous unpleasantness. In Rome they had a coin paid to Judas, the touching of which reduced a stay in purgatory by fourteen hundred years. Of course, you couldn't touch the coin for free.

  When Luther arrived, he went, like any tourist, to visit the sites. He saw a piece of the burning bush, the chains of Saint Paul, and the white spots on the walls where the stones had turned to snowballs when thrown at Saint Peter. He saw the scissors used by the emperor Domit-ian to cut Saint John's hair, and the napkin of Saint Veronica on which was imprinted the likeness of Jesus. He touched the bones and dropped coins into the appropriate receptacles, but as he wandered around the city, he couldn't help but notice how rich Rome was, how magnificently the members of the Church lived.

  He saw the grand houses, the expensive clothes, the wine, the women, and the art on the walls. He began to wonder if all the money Germany had given to Rome for crusades and other worthy projects wasn't actually going into the pockets of the pope and the other high Church officials. Even worse, he saw the bored and mechanical way in which the priests in Rome said Mass and administered the Sacraments, and he was shocked.

  The high point of a visit to Rome was the Scala Sancta, a set of twenty-eight stairs. Whoever crawled up each stair on his or her hands and knees, faithfully reciting a prayer at each step, could release a soul from purgatory right then and there, no matter how many years that soul still had left. Luther went for his grandfather. He went all the way, but then, at the very top, something happened that would soon change the world.

  He wondered whether any of this worked at all.

  LUTHER RETURNED TO Germany and studied. He rea
d Scripture more intensely than ever before because he thought the answers to his dilemmas could only be found there. He read so diligently that the once fastidious but nondescript monk began to be known as something of a scholar.

  Here another byproduct of the information revolution came into play—the development and rapid growth of universities. While the schools in France, particularly the University of Paris, were the acknowledged leaders, princes all over Europe rushed to establish schools in their provinces to increase their influence or as a measure of their importance.

  All this created an enormous need for faculty. Almost anyone who could read Latin was pressed into service. All sorts of people who had never before given a thought to teaching suddenly found themselves behind the lectern. So it was that Martin Luther became a professor of Latin in 1515 at the newly established University of Wittenberg, just in time to witness one of the biggest deals the Church had ever attempted, one that would bring down the entire system of indulgences for profit.

  In 1517, Albert of Brandenburg, a prominent member of the house of Hohenzollern (the family that four centuries later was to give the world Kaiser Wilhelm II and World War I), decided that he wanted to be archbishop of Mainz. Mainz, where Gutenberg's Bible had been printed some sixty years before, was extremely prosperous, and thus there were substantial revenues associated with the bishopric. Albert had political reasons for the move as well. He already held the sees at Magdeburg and Halberstadt, and adding Mainz would certainly make him the most powerful single churchman in all of Germany.

  But Albert's path to theological and secular supremacy was by no means assured. As always, the Hohenzollerns were to be contested by their archrivals, the Hapsburgs, who, in Charles V, had a powerful patron in the wings.

  The way to attain the position, Albert knew, was to buy it, and what made him sure that it would be for sale was Pope Leo X. Leo, who had succeeded Julius and who has been described as “as elegant and as indolent as a Persian cat,” had expensive tastes even by papal standards and viewed his election as pope in 1513 as an excellent vehicle by which to gratify them. He delighted in spending vast sums of the Church's resources on carnivals, war, gambling, and the chase. He even altered the mode of papal dress by wearing long hunting boots, making it a good deal more difficult for the devout to kiss his toe.

  Born Giovanni de' Medici, Leo also had the Medicis' great appreciation of the arts, and he further depleted Rome's treasury by spending large sums subsidizing great masters like Raphael. Although museum directors today may be thrilled by the resulting output, after only four years under Leo's administration, Rome was going broke.

  At the moment that Albert of Brandenburg decided to become archbishop of Mainz, Leo was in even more dire need of funds than usual. To assure his legacy, he was very anxious to complete a huge project commenced by Julius, to whom he was always being unfavorably—and, he thought, unfairly—compared.

  The old wooden basilica of Saint Peter's, constructed in the age of Constantine, was beyond repair, and Julius had cajoled and bullied the consistory into approving the construction of a dome as large as a football field over the remains of the apostles Peter and Paul. (Julius had cajoled and bullied Michelangelo into painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel just a year or two earlier.) Just when the piers had been laid, Julius's long-standing case of syphilis finally caught up with him. (For appearance's sake, it was let out that he died of fever, a catch-all illness that served to explain any number of fatalities. Pope Alexander VI, the one who had mistakenly ingested poison, was said to have died of a fever too.) With Julius dead, work on the new Saint Peter's had then lagged to the point where weeds had begun to sprout from the pillars. Unless the basilica could be completed, the site would be a constant reminder of Leo's financial, and perhaps spiritual, mismanagement to everyone who passed by.

  Leo, Albert knew, would be ready to deal.

  And so he did, the two coming to an arrangement worthy of a ig8os-vintage leveraged buyout. Leo, unable to resist the opportunity to solve his financial problems in one stroke, offered the archbishopric of Mainz to Albert for ten thousand ducats, under ordinary circumstances an outlandish sum. Albert, of course, agreed. But even he did not have that kind of cash on hand, and since Leo demanded the entire ten thousand up front, it was further agreed that Albert would seek to borrow the money from the great Fugger banking house in Augsburg. Given the quality of the participants, the Fuggers were happy to underwrite the deal. They put up the entire amount, which would be repaid by the new archbishop.

  In order to give Albert the means with which to repay the Fuggers, the pope agreed to float an unprecedented public offering on Albert's behalf. Leo gave Albert the right to sell indulgences for eight years. One half of the proceeds would go toward retiring Albert's debt; the other half would be kicked back to Rome's capital budget, earmarked for the dormant construction site at Saint Peter's.

  Indulgences were a sort of common stock investment in the after-world, certificates signed by the pope and then sold to the faithful, guaranteeing remission of the sins of the purchasers. Even more than the visiting of relics, indulgences had become the principal fund-raising tool of the Church. So many were sold that it became unwieldy for scribes to write them out by hand. In a great historical irony, among the first documents produced with movable type, predating Gutenberg's Bible by two years, was a stack of indulgences. The printed indulgences of 1453, the earliest known example of job printing, had blanks left where the name of the purchaser and the amount of his contribution could be filled in.

  For Albert's deal, since there was a lot of money at stake and indulgences were obviously nothing new, Leo made this particular indulgence something really special. Purchasers of Albert's papal bull would enjoy a plenary and perfect remission of all their sins. They would be restored to the state of innocence that they enjoyed at baptism and would be relieved of the pains of purgatory. Not only did it cleanse a purchaser of past sins, it applied to the future as well. There was no set price, but it was understood that a sweeping indulgence of this sort shouldn't come cheap. Now, even peasants could return to innocence by giving over their meager life savings to the Church.

  To further ensure the success of the offering, Leo dispatched his crack indulgence broker, a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel, to Germany. Tetzel would arrive in each small town riding in a cart pulled by two horses, with a very large cross set right in the middle. The local dignitaries would meet him at the city gate and lead him through the streets. When the crowds had gathered, Tetzel made his pitch. According to William Robertson in his classic work, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, it went something like this:

  The souls confined in purgatory, for whose redemption indulgences are purchased, as soon as the money tinkles in the chest, instantly escape from that place of torment, and ascend into heaven… even if one should violate (which was impossible) the Mother of God, the person [would] be freed both from punishment and guilt. This was the unspeakable gift of God, in order to reconcile men to himself. The cross erected by the preachers of indulgences, was as efficacious as the cross of Christ itself. Lo! The heavens are open: if you enter not now, when will you enter? For twelve pence you may redeem the soul of your father out of purgatory; and are you so ungrateful, that you will not rescue your parent from torment? If you had but one coat, you ought to strip yourself instantly, and sell it, in order to purchase such benefits.

  Tetzel conveniently left out the fact that half the money was going to bankers to pay off Albert's debt.

  As Tetzel was making the rounds through Germany, he came to the outskirts of Wittenberg. He wasn't allowed into Wittenberg because the local prince, Frederick the Wise, would not allow it. Frederick had been persuaded by Luther that a piece of paper couldn't get you into heaven, and besides, he didn't particularly care for Albert. So Tetzel went right up to the border so that any of the citizens of the town, many of whom were members of Luther's flock, could cross over and buy from him, wh
ich they did, in droves.

  Some then took their certificate and showed it to Luther.

  Luther was appalled. He wrote up a placard in Latin, listing ninety-five objections to the current practices of the Church. As was the custom at the time, he nailed his placard to the door of the local church. “Indulgences are positively harmful to the recipient because they impede salvation by diverting charity and inducing a false sense of security,” he wrote in the Ninety-Five Theses.

  When it came to purgatory itself, Luther was even more persuasive:

  Therefore I claim that the pope has no jurisdiction over purgatory… If the pope does have the power to release anyone from purgatory, why in the name of love does he not abolish purgatory by letting everyone out? If for the sake of miserable money he released uncounted souls, why should he not for the sake of most holy love empty the place?

  Luther intended these remarks for an audience of scholars and as a basis for theologic debate only. They were never intended for general distribution. He did, however, send a copy to Albert (now Albert of Mainz), along with an explanatory letter, both of which Albert immediately forwarded to Rome. The genial Leo, in one of the great mis-readings of events in history, is reputed to have said, “Luther is a drunken German. He will feel differently when he is sober”

  From there, the whole affair might simply have blown over. But then something happened, something that would not have been possible fifty years earlier, or for any of the thousand years that the Church had held total sway over the spiritual life of Europe. A small Wittenberg press run by an insignificant printer named Hans Lufft took Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and had them printed, bound, and distributed. The book was even translated from Latin into German so that the common people could read and understand what Luther had written.