Out of the Flames Read online

  IN 1529, HIS TWO-YEAR LEAVE expired, Servetus left Toulouse to return to the service of Juan de Quintana. Quintana had had a very good two years. He was now confessor to Charles V and a member of the emperor's inner circle.

  After a rocky beginning in Spain (the populace had not been pleased that Ferdinand had been succeeded by a short, pale, extremely homely nineteen-year-old Belgian who couldn't speak the language), Charles was finally gaining acceptance. It hadn't hurt that Charles's troops had captured Francis in Italy—nobody was more surprised about that than Charles, who hadn't actually ordered his army to fight, the initiative, in this case, coming from one of his pluckier generals—but he'd made the most of it. He was now ready for the big prize.

  For some years, Charles had wanted the official blessing of the pope for his election as emperor, thereby isolating Francis, consolidating his holdings, and ensuring the legal ascension of his line to the same title. Unfortunately, at that moment the somewhat fickle new pope, Clement VII, was more favorably disposed toward Francis, and it looked like Clement was going to need some convincing. When the pope entered into a military alliance with Francis, Charles, drawing on troops from Spain and Germany, invaded Italy and headed for Rome.

  The wealth of the Catholic Church sat waiting in the largely undefended holy city, and the army, an unpaid and hungry rabble, itched to get at it. When Charles tried to hold them back while negotiating terms with Clement, they mutinied and attacked against his orders.

  On May 6, 1527, Charles's soldiers broke through Rome's tattered defenses, overran the city, and began an orgy of looting, rape, and murder. Members of the Church were singled out for particular brutality. Cardinals and other wealthy members of the Curia were tortured, held for ransom, then slaughtered. Nuns were violated in the streets or sold to brothels. The Tiber was choked with corpses. Anything the soldiers couldn't use, they burned. Every house in Rome was plundered, and the Vatican was used as a stable.

  The imperial troops remained in Rome for nine months, leaving only when the food supply ran out and plague appeared. In their wake, they left over ten thousand dead and walked off with ransom payments many times larger than those that would have been demanded for a king.

  The sack of Rome turned out to have far more significance than its military or even social consequences. It was an event that shook the Catholic Church to its moral foundations. Many of the most pious blamed the disaster not on Charles, but rather on the corruption that had overrun Catholicism. This was the wrath of God, Sodom and Gomorrah revisited.

  Clement himself was spared the worst of it. He fled through a secret passage in Castel Sant'Angelo to safety outside the city but was eventually captured by Charles and held prisoner. Charles soon realized that an imprisoned, emasculated pope was not doing him much good, so he proposed a deal. After much harrumphing and six months in captivity, Clement saw his way to agreeing to a coronation. As Quintana's private secretary, Michael Servetus received one of the prized invitations to the event.

  Rome being out of the question, the coronation was held in Bologna on February 24, 1530, the largest, grandest, most lavish affair of its time, a kind of inaugural ball, millennium party, and royal wedding all rolled into one. There was a huge parade through the city. Arches with golden inscriptions had been erected on every corner, and marble statues of lions and eagles stood along the parade route. The lions had red wine gushing from their mouths, the eagles white. One hundred thousand people crowded the streets and rooftops, hung out of windows, and stood on each other's shoulders, all to get a glimpse of the pope and Charles. Before them came musicians, soldiers, princes, cardinals, and dignitaries from across Europe, all dressed in flowing finery. The pope, wearing a triple gold crown, was carried from his palace to the Church of Saint Petronius in a golden chair under a golden canopy. When the pope arrived at the church, Charles kissed his foot and begged to be received as his son.

  Servetus, just eighteen, fresh from his reform-minded ivory tower, found this profligacy disgusting, epitomizing everything he had come to believe was the corruption that had overcome his Church. He wrote later:

  The Pope dares not touch his feet to the earth lest his holiness be defiled. He has himself borne upon the shoulders of men and adored as a God upon earth. Since the foundation of the world, no one has ever dared try anything more wicked. I have seen with my own eyes how the Pope was carried with pomp on the shoulders of princes, making threatening crosses with his hand, and adored in the open squares by people on bended knee. All those who managed to kiss his feet or his sandals deemed themselves happy beyond the others and proclaimed to have obtained the greatest indulgences and that for this the punishments of hell had been remitted for many years. Oh, the most evil of the beasts, harlots most shameless.

  This coronation was to be the turning point in Servetus's life. After witnessing this spectacle, he abruptly resigned from Quintana's service. But he'd seen too much to go tamely back to school and instead went off in search of the frontline of reform. Any remaining moderation he felt had been excised by the opulence and hypocrisy in Bologna, and his determination to lead a rebirth of Christianity would stay with him the rest of his life—and be the cause of his death.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE REFORMATION, WHICH had begun slightly over a decade before with Luther's small act of defiance, had by this time spilled out of Wittenberg into nearly every corner of Europe. From Poland to Spain, the undercurrents of dissatisfaction with the established order coalesced around the new doctrine. The most receptive audience, however, located in a place where reform wasn't simply preached surreptitiously in isolated corners but actively— and sometimes violently—put into practice, turned out to be right next door, in Switzerland.

  Then, as now, Switzerland was a confederacy of cantons (essentially city-states)—with German spoken in some and French in others— except that in the early sixteenth century their alliance was a good deal more tenuous than it is today. The Swiss confederation had been created in 1291 when three German-speaking communities near Lake Lucerne entered into an agreement—a “Perpetual Covenant,” they called it—dedicated not so much to absolute independence as to resistance to absentee rule. By 1513, the confederacy had grown from three cantons to thirteen. Allied with but not exactly part of this arrangement were French-speaking Lausanne and Geneva.

  These communities were still dedicated only to resisting Hapsburg or French domination, and whenever the threat from these two giants receded, the cantons amused themselves by creating flimsy alliances and then engaging in treachery or outright war with one another. The Swiss, as they soon discovered, were very good at war. Their mercenaries —the sole national export, if it could be called that—found themselves in high demand for their stoicism, tenacity, and willingness to fight with equal ferocity on either side of a conflict, depending on who was willing to pay them more at any particular time. Pope Julius II used them to great advantage in protecting Italy from the French; Francis used them to equal advantage in fighting Julius's successor, Leo; and Charles used them whenever he had a small problem anywhere in his empire, which was just about all the time. “Their unity, and the glory of their armies, have made famous the name of this so savage and barbarous nation,” a contemporary observed. These Swiss were a far cry from the bankers and watchmakers of the current day.

  There was one exception, Basel, which had come into the group late, about 1500. Basel took the rest of boorish, savage, and barbarous Switzerland and gave it class. That was because Basel, rich and bourgeois, had fallen early under the spell of humanism and had become renowned throughout Europe as a great center of learning.

  For more than a century, Basel had attracted the best scholars—Italians, Germans, and, after the fall of Constantinople, Greeks. One of these wandering intellectuals, an Italian with a mouthful of a name, Eneo Silvio Piccolomini, came for a visit in the 1430s and ended up staying ten years. When he got a better job, he shortened his name to the considerably more manageable Pope Pius II
.

  This was the same Pope Pius who had made Johannus Bessarion a cardinal for bringing all of those manuscripts to Venice from Constantinople. Unlike many of the dilettante academics of the time, Pope Pius was the real thing, a man who delighted in learning, and he retained an affection for Basel even after he was ensconced in Rome. In 1459, he authorized the foundation of a university in Basel that was openly and unabashedly devoted to a humanist course of study.

  Hundreds of Europe's most luminous scholars touched base at one time or another at the University of Basel. Even that giant of giants, Desiderius Erasmus, who had all the world to choose from, decided on Basel as the place to research, write, and publish his groundbreaking translation of the New Testament. When he arrived, he was given as an assistant the chief preacher at the cathedral of Basel, a sallow, humorless but very able priest named Johann Hausschein.

  The presence of the university had lured the printing business to Basel. The most prestigious printer in the world at the time, Johann Froben—a man who had had the foresight to publish both Erasmus and Luther—had set up shop in the city. Froben was the opposite of Aldus. Rather than turn out pages almost before a writer could finish them, he worked slowly, nurturing his authors and helping them over the rough spots. He even paid advances against royalties when it was clearly understood that sometimes there would be no royalties. Froben, Erasmus wrote, was someone “with whom you could throw dice in the dark.”

  From Basel's books and Basel's university the rest of the Swiss confederacy learned about humanism and reformation. The city was like a softly glowing star attracting energy and then sending it out again, gently but persistently until its warmth reached the uppermost reaches of the Alps.

  It was to that Basel that Michael Servetus headed.

  THE BASEL AT “WHICH he arrived, however, had changed considerably from the humanist paradise of the Erasmian days. The Reformation had not come gently to Switzerland, and even its most enlightened city had felt the sting. The biggest change was in Erasmus's old sour-faced assistant, Johann Hausschein.

  Hausschein had undergone a complete transformation—he was not even Hausschein anymore. He had Latinized his name, which meant “house light,” to the literally translated but significantly more impressive-sounding Johannes Oecolampadius. Emulating Luther, in 1528 he, also, had gotten married. (Erasmus, with great surprise, noted, “A few days ago Oecolampadius married a girl who is not bad looking.”)

  The new name and new wife were just the start. When the Basel town council passed an edict advocating freedom of worship, it was Oecolampadius, abandoning humanism for the very type of partisan zealotry that Erasmus abhorred, who led the protests. On February 8, 1529, a year before the coronation of Charles V in Bologna, eight hundred men, urged on by their new reform leader, rose before dawn and stood in the Basel marketplace demanding the end of Mass, the expulsion of Catholics from the government, and a general reworking of the town constitution. By evening, they had armed themselves and taken over the marketplace. The next day, the mob had grown to thousands and soon did what mobs will do. They ran through the streets, smashing every Catholic image they could find and laying waste to the city's churches.

  “The smiths and workmen removed the pictures from the churches… not a statue was left either in the churches, or the vestibules, or the porches, or the monasteries,” wrote Erasmus, describing the carnage. “The frescoes were obliterated by means of a coating of lime. Whatever would burn was thrown into the fire, and the rest was pounded into fragments. Nothing was spared for love or money.”

  By the end of the day, Basel was a Protestant city, and Oecolampadius was its most powerful citizen. Repulsed, Erasmus and nearly every other humanist professor at the university packed up and left town. A year later, to repressive, postrevolutionary Basel, now the intellectual center of Swiss Reformation, Michael Servetus came, eager to make a revolution of his own.

  When he got to town, Servetus went straight to Oecolampadius's home, where he learned that Erasmus was gone but was himself invited to remain as a guest. While it was not at all uncommon for reform leaders to put up refugees personally, it is not hard to imagine Oecolampadius's reaction when the young, brilliant, highly charged scholar, fresh from a key assignment at Charles Vs own court, appeared at his door. A more prized recruit would be hard to envision. He introduced Servetus to every important reform leader in the area and trumpeted the young man's virtues.

  Rather than the acolyte Oecolampadius was expecting, however, someone who could be a strong right arm against the forces of reaction, here instead was a domineering, self-assured teenager who had no intention of being an appendage to anyone. He lectured his host on his shortcomings, insisting that Oecolampadius and the reformers had not gone nearly far enough. Without a willingness to attack the fundamental precepts of Catholic dogma, Servetus thundered, no meaningful reform was imaginable—there could be no possible restoration of the simpler, more generous Christianity propounded by Jesus himself. Servetus even came with his own battle plan for purging Christianity of Roman corruption. Everything, he insisted, came back to the Trinity.

  THE CONCEPT OF THE TRINITY arose out of the First Council of Nicaea, convened by Emperor Constantine the Great in 325 to deal with the divisiveness that had erupted from differences in interpretation as to the nature of God and the divinity of Christ. Constantine, the first Roman emperor to himself embrace Christianity, had just finished defeating his rival Licinius and uniting what was left of the Roman Empire, and now he wanted to unite the religion as well. There was a bishop named Arius, a Libyan, who was preaching that while God, the Father, was timeless, infinite, and divine, Jesus, the Son, was created by God and subordinate to the Father, and therefore not divine, or at least not as divine as the Father.

  For the Church hierarchy the problem with this interpretation—one that was to plague Christianity for more than a millennium—was that if Jesus was concluded to be less than divine, he might have been simply a man made divine through faith and acts. And if that were true, might not that same potential be available to all men? And if that were so, how could the Church hold itself to be the irreplaceable intermediary between man and God, a position from which, even back in the fourth century, it derived its enormous political power?

  Obviously, given these stakes, the teachings of Arius would not do. Constantine, as a recent convert, was all too amenable to the entreaties of Pope Sylvester I and other Church elders that he use his great might and prestige to help find a solution. So in late spring of 325, at Nicaea, Constantine convened the First Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church.

  The opening ceremonies were held in the central hall of the imperial palace. Constantine waited until all the bishops had entered, then, wearing a gold crown and a robe covered in jewels, strode in and took his place on a golden throne. Only after he was in his seat were the bishops allowed to sit as well. There were over three hundred of them, among them Arius himself, as well as thousands of priests, deacons, and acolytes.

  The wrangling began almost immediately and went on for weeks. Constantine, way out of his depth with such esoteric ecclesiastical doctrine, didn't say much and soon stopped attending altogether. He continued, however, to provide palatial accommodations and sumptuous repasts for his guests.

  The bishops wrestled with the problem of finding a means to reconcile what seemed to be three separate and distinct definitions. From the Hebrew Scriptures and the teachings of Jesus, God was one, the omnipotent and omnipresent Father, limitless, timeless, and immutable. Christ, on the other hand, seemed to be both God and man, both Son of God and God himself. Then there was God who was present in all men.

  The debate raged on until, finally, the council came up with this:

  We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of the same su
bstance with the Father, through whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth; who for us men and our salvation descended, was incarnate, and was made man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven and cometh to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost.

  Those who say: There was a time when He was not, and He was not before He was begotten; and that He was made out of nothing; or who maintain that He is of another hy-postasis or another substance [than the Father], or that the Son of God is created, or mutable, or subject to change, [them] the Catholic Church anathematizes.

  From that day forward, then, God was to be a unity of three entities: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All were equally God, and each shared in the divine attributes of ultimacy, eternity, and changeless-ness; yet they were distinguishable in their relation to one another and in their roles within earthly life and destiny. The Father (God as both the Christian and Semitic religions knew Him) remained largely the same. Jesus, however, became more than a prophet adopted by God—he became the Son of God in a unique sense. He was God's Word (Logos) made flesh, divinity incarnate in a human. Then there was the third aspect, the Holy Spirit, from which believers received their faith, their confidence in the truth of that faith, and their holiness, and without which the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist had no meaning.

  In the end, only two bishops refused to go along with the new definition. They were anathematized and banished. Arius's works were then burned, and he was exiled to Illyria, site of present-day Albania, as lacking in charm then as it is now. To close the council, Constantine celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his rule and invited the bishops to a huge feast, at the end of which he bestowed opulent parting gifts on each of them.