Out of the Flames Read online

  The books sold out and the public clamored for more. The Vatican, now taking “the drunken German” more seriously, issued a ban prohibiting Luther from preaching. Luther responded by writing out his sermons, including one that discussed what was wrong with the ban.

  As Luther kept writing, Lufft kept printing. Riding the wave of his star author's popularity, Hans Lufft became one of the most important publishers in Germany. Other printers soon joined in. Johann Froben, Erasmus's printer in Basel, produced a single volume of Luther's work that contained the Ninety-Five Theses, Resolutions, Answer to Prierias, Sermon on Penitence, and Sermon on the Eucharist and wrote to the author that nothing he had ever printed had sold out so quickly. Six hundred were shipped to France and Spain, and others went to England. Ulrich Zwingli, who by now was running his own reform operation in Zurich, special-ordered several hundred copies and then sent out riders on horseback to distribute them throughout the countryside. Copies of Luther's writings made it to Italy, even to Rome itself.

  Rome upped the stakes by excommunicating Luther, but it no longer mattered. Once he had attained bestseller status, Luther's work was even more in demand. (That he publicly burned the bull that announced his excommunication did nothing to diminish his appeal.)

  In 1520, this son of a peasant, a man who had been superstitious and illiterate into young adulthood, who had never been out of Germany except for one brief visit to Rome, stood at the Diet of Worms in front of Emperor Charles V, arguably the most powerful man in the world, and was told to recant. But by then Luther had with him his books, the power of the printed word, and, with it, the support of the people.

  Martin Luther refused to recant. “Here I stand,” he said.

  It was the end of the papal bull market and the beginning of the Reformation.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN JUAN DE QUINTANA left Zaragossa for the larger, more prestigious University of Barcelona, Miguel Serveto went along with him. Soon afterward, however, in 1527 when Miguel was sixteen, his father, now more convinced than ever that his extraordinarily talented eldest son should have the best education possible, proposed that he be sent to study at the University of Toulouse, one of the preeminent schools of law in Europe. Toulouse was close by, as close as Barcelona to the east, only about one hundred miles north of Huesca—although you did have to cross the Pyrenees. Here, the elder Serveto felt, Miguel could not only acquire a prestigious degree but also be safe from the forces of blasphemy that were now shaking the Continent. Toulouse was known as a center of pious orthodoxy. The city had even constructed a special iron cage attached to a wooden platform at the river to be used for drowning those who deviated in any way from canon law. A reformer later wrote:

  [Toulouse] was very superstitious, full of relics and other instruments of idolatry, so that it was sufficient to be condemned as a heretic if one did not take off his hat before an image or did not bend his knee at the sound of the bell calling for the Ave Maria, or if one tasted a single morsel of meat on a prohibited day. And there was no one who had delight in languages or letters who would not be watched and considered suspected of heresy.

  Wanting his protégé to get a more cosmopolitan view of the world, as well as the legal training that he himself lacked, Quintana granted Miguel two years' leave to study at the university.

  What neither Anthon Serveto nor, evidently, Quintana knew was that unlike the city of Toulouse, the University of Toulouse had become a hotbed of radicalism. With ten thousand of the brightest students from across Europe and six hundred of the best lecturers, it was impossible for the university to be immune from the changes that Luther and his followers had precipitated. In many ways, the split at Toulouse between a conservative populace and insurgent professors epitomized the situation in France as a whole. Throughout the country, especially in Paris, the Church was tenaciously trying to maintain tradition—and the power of tradition—and the reformers were trying to break it down. In the middle, a balance of power unto himself, tilting sometimes this way and sometimes that, was the dashing, virile Francis I.

  FRANCIS HAD ASCENDED the throne of France in 1515 at the age of twenty-one. He enjoyed the hunt, outdoors and in, loved art, beauty, wine, riding, and, exhibiting a trait not uncommon in kings, having his own way. His defining moment had come in 1526, when, having fallen in battle in Italy against Charles V, he was taken prisoner and confined ignominiously in a tiny, marginally furnished, very un-Francislike room in an old castle in Madrid. Under this coercion he signed the Treaty of Madrid, agreeing to all of Charles's terms, including the surrender of Burgundy and Flanders. He was returned by barge to the French border, where he met his two sons, who, by the same treaty, had been consigned to Charles as hostages to ensure Francis's good faith. The boys, eight and seven, just over the measles, surrounded by military guard, about to be deprived of family, love, and schooling, were embraced by their father. Then Francis got off the boat, climbed onto his horse, yelled, “I am king again!” and proceeded to renege on the whole agreement. He rode off to his new château to meet his mother, sister, and mistress, leaving his two small sons to take his place in the tiny room in the old castle. It would be four years before the children were ransomed and returned to France.

  Francis was not a deeply religious man himself, but he came to have an acute understanding of the manner in which religion could be manipulated to further political ends. With regard to the troublesome ideas of the new reformers, Francis was of two minds. On the one hand, Luther and his fellow reformers were causing the emperor a lot of trouble, and Francis was very much in favor of anything that caused Charles a lot of trouble. Accordingly, he made overtures to the German Lutheran princes and reformers and supported their efforts abroad whenever he felt it might needle Charles.

  But reform had an uncomfortable way of spreading beyond borders, possibly even into France itself. As a result of an old agreement with Leo, Francis was in the unique position of being able to appoint the clergy in his own country. He had acquired this privilege in 1516 after invading Milan and forcing the pope's hand militarily, much as Charles would force a later pope, Clement VII, to make him emperor. (Francis, ever the esthete, took both Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa home as spoils of war.)

  The agreement with Leo made for an uneasy French alliance of church and state. While it was true that the clergy were now dependent upon their king and not their pope for their livelihood and advancement, it was also true that it would be this same clergy who would eventually loan Francis the 1,300,000 livres he needed to ransom his sons back from Charles. To the church in France, led by the theologi-cal faculty at the University of Paris, commonly known as the Sorbonne, the reform movement was heresy.

  The reformers, however, were not without resources. They had their own champion in the person of Marguerite d'Angoulême, also known as Marguerite of Navarre, the king's older sister.

  Marguerite was a twentieth-century feminist trapped in the prejudice and sexual politics of the sixteenth. Intelligent, passionate, and yearning, she wrote poetry and a novel about sexual politics, studied Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian, and even mastered a smattering of Hebrew. She adored her brother and forgave all his transgressions. It was Marguerite who made the arduous journey to nurse Francis when he fell ill in Madrid, who played hostess to his vast, traveling court (when the king went hunting in Bordeaux, it took 22,500 horses and mules to move everybody in his entourage), who wrote him long, fervent letters in which she poured out all of her devotion whenever he was away.

  But Marguerite's position as a member of the royal family sometimes made her a pawn in Francis's political machinations. Royal women existed to be married off for national gain, either to cement an alliance or to consolidate property. Only a very few were clever enough to get out of it.

  Henry VIII's sister, Mary Tudor, was one of them. In 1514, when Henry double-crossed Ferdinand and made his deal with Francis's predecessor, Louis XII, he instructed Mary to marry Louis because Louis's wife had died w
ithout leaving him an heir. Louis was in his fifties, “bent over, sagging, thin and worn.” He also had gout. Mary, on the other hand, was just eighteen, considered one of the most stunning women in Europe, and desperately in love with the manly Duke of Suffolk. She agreed to marry Louis if Henry would allow her then to marry whomever she wanted after Louis died, which promised to be shortly.

  So Mary came to France and married the disgusting Louis. This was not merely a marriage of convenience. She was expected to provide an heir. After their first night together, Mary's legendary good looks seemed to have had some effect. Louis emerged from the nuptial bedchamber “very jovial and merry and in love,” modestly proclaiming that “he had performed marvels.” But the marvels didn't take, and soon Louis began to show signs of “wear and tear.” He died a few months later, on New Year's Day, apparently still trying, but there was no heir.

  But what to do with Mary? As Louis's widow she now had a claim on the French throne, or at least the French treasury. Francis, who had been the dauphin and was now the king, had been lusting after Mary since she had set foot in France. He graciously offered to solve this potential problem by divorcing his current wife, Claude, and marrying Mary instead. But Mary, having already sacrificed herself to one royal French marriage, had no intention of doing so again. To discourage Francis, she confessed her love for Suffolk, to the point of telling him the details of their secret love code. Once he realized that he could not procure her for himself, Francis was only too happy to help Mary marry Suffolk, since that would take her out of the marriage alliance business altogether and protect Francis's interests. So he arranged for Mary and Suffolk to marry secretly in Paris, promising to smooth things over with Henry.

  But Henry would not be smoothed. As it turned out, he had been insincere. (Henry was often insincere.) He hadn't meant what he said about Mary marrying whomever she wanted after Louis. In fact, Henry wanted to behead Suffolk.

  So Mary took matters into her own hands. She filched the famous “Mirror of Naples,” a huge diamond on a pendant and one of the most prized heirlooms of France, out of her widow-of-Louis jewelry box, then smuggled it, along with some pearls and all of her Louis XII gold plate dining room service, to England by stuffing everything into donkey packs. Then she and Suffolk wrote a long apologetic note to Henry, telling him how sorry they were, and how they couldn't help it, and how they remained his loyal servants, and wouldn't he please forgive them, etc., etc., and, by the way, here was a little something to ease the pain.

  When the theft was discovered, Francis was furious and demanded the return of the diamond, but it was too late. The Mirror of Naples appeased Henry enough that he allowed Mary and Suffolk to return to England with both of their heads still attached, although they were banished from London and forced to retire to an out-of-the-way spot in the countryside. The closest Mary would get to a throne again was the aborted nine-day rule of her granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey.

  MARGUERITE, IN MUCH THE same position as Mary, had a far closer relationship with her brother and was willing, albeit grudgingly, to marry anyone Francis thought would further his interests. Her first husband, the Duke of Alençon, had filed lawsuits against Francis; these were dropped with the marriage. In 1525, he fled the battle in which Francis was captured and died a coward. Her second husband, Henri d'Albret, king of Navarre, was eleven years her junior and not particularly happy about having been wed to someone he considered to be middle-aged.

  Marguerite's spirit and intelligence only made the limitations of her marriages worse, but even so, she was unwilling to compromise her honor. She was pursued by a lover, Guillaume Gouffier, who went by the name of Bonnivet; he tried to coax her into adultery and, when that failed, sneaked into her bedroom one night to take advantage of her, but she fought him off, forcing him to retreat, scratched and bitten, to his own bedroom. She later had her revenge by writing down the whole incident, which was published as one of the stories in her roman à clef, the Heptaméron.

  Passionate and frustrated, she turned to the only outlet available to her—religion. Not the old, corrupt religion, but the new, more spiritual religion, sparked by the cultured French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and the revolutionary Martin Luther, and embodied by the reformist Cercle de Meaux.

  Meaux was a diocese just east of Paris. In 1521, a year after Luther's pronouncement at Worms, the bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, a deeply devout, spiritual, yet practical man, became upset with the ignorance and superstition being heaped on his flock by the local Franciscans and invited a group of reform-minded evangelicals to the diocese to help sort the matter out. Lefèvre was one who came to lend a hand, as were Gérard Roussel and Guillaume Farel. They divided the countryside into sections and went around preaching a more enlightened Christianity. These men became known as the Cercle de Meaux.

  Briçonnet was just what Marguerite was looking for, someone to give her life purpose and structure. She approved of his goal of gradual, gentle reform, and she struck up a correspondence with him. He, for his part, introduced her to the writings and ideas of Lefèvre and Luther and urged her to use her influence with her brother to further the cause. Marguerite became an immediate convert and, because of her celebrity, a leader and advocate of reform in France.

  Marguerite was attracted to the intellectuals, and the intellectuals were attracted to Marguerite. The universities became the prime breeding ground of dissent in France. The University of Toulouse in particular was soon to receive an extra jolt. It was in January 1527 that Marguerite married Henri d'Albret, thus becoming queen of Navarre, at least that part of Navarre north of the Pyrenees. With the opportunity to set up a court of her own in order to provide a safe haven for those who shared her views, she chose Nérac, less than seventy miles west of Toulouse. The intellectual ferment quickly radiated into the surrounding French provinces.

  A few months later, Miguel Serveto arrived at Toulouse.

  THE UNIVERSITY “WAS structured according to the scholastic divisions of law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. Theology, as always, was dominant, and since civil law was to a great degree controlled by ecclesiastic doctrine, the law faculty was more an offshoot than a separate entity. The university was divided in another way as well—students were grouped by nationality, at least in their living arrangements. The Spaniards were all together, and it was the first time that Miguel Serveto felt the force of the prejudice against his country.

  But it was also a period of great excitement at the university, and the lure of humanism and the revolution of reform crossed all national and ethnic boundaries. A student signaled his desire to be a part of this new movement by following the fashion of scholars and humanists and taking a Latin name. It was here, at Toulouse, that Miguel Serveto became Michael Servetus.

  Although the students accepted the required curriculum, in many ways they created a curriculum of their own. From all over Europe they brought with them the new subversive literature, books like Loci Communes, by Luther protégé Philip Melanchthon, which passed the ideas of sin, gospel, and justification through a reformist filter and introduced the highly controversial notion of predestination. But the most subversive book that they read—a book that, if a student were caught with it, could lead to imprisonment or a terrible death—was the Bible.

  Prohibiting access to the Bible had for more than a thousand years been the primary instrument of Church control. Only a select few were allowed to read the Scriptures and determine their meaning. The Church had used this power to further its own position with kings and commoners alike. Alternate interpretations might undermine Rome's iron grip.

  But Erasmus's New Testament and the later, much more comprehensive Biblia Polyglotta Compluti, or Complutensian Polyglot Bible, changed all that. The Complutensian Polyglot was edited by the influential Spanish humanist Cardinal Ximenes and was published with the approval of the Vatican in 1522. It contained the entire Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek with the Latin Vulgate translation running in a p
arallel column throughout. Leo X so trusted Ximenes, was so confident that this new edition would support rather than undermine the authority of Rome, that he let Ximenes use the Vatican's own manuscripts. But Ximenes, who employed nine linguists, including three baptized Jews, to ensure authenticity, cared about scholarship, not politics.

  Copies of both Erasmus's translation and the Complutensian Polyglot were passed secretly hand to hand, and reading the Bible became a constant and regular part of the students' lives. They ignored the threat of being burned at the stake or drowned in the river and did what university students always do—they stayed up late at night debating the philosophical and political implications of what they had read. And to many of them, including Servetus, the implications were that Rome had corrupted both the text of the Bible and the fundamental tenets of Christianity, and there could be no truth in Christianity until this corruption was eliminated.

  Servetus was in a unique position because he read not only Greek but also Hebrew, which meant that he could read the full text of the Complutensian Polyglot in the original languages and see the differences between the ancient passages and the Vulgate translation. But Servetus's extraordinary scholarship took him one step further. He added Arabic to his repertoire so that he could read the Koran as well. He was still only seventeen years old.

  From these studies, Servetus concluded that only a return to classic biblical scholarship could save the religion. While this was further than Luther had ever gone, it was not a unique point of view. Had Servetus stopped there, he might have blended in with other reformers and become an influential leader in the new movement. But Servetus, the minority student, always the outsider, would never be content to be a part of a greater whole.