A History of the World (45 page)

Luther’s thinking was that of a Christian intellectual who had come to loathe the cerebral, sophisticated classical Greek thought of Plato and Aristotle, on which traditional Church theology rested. His main impulse, when he had reached his conclusion about sin, was emotional and personal, an urgent sense of release and joy that demanded to be communicated – and which had nothing to do with the Church hierarchy or liturgies. He described himself as feeling ‘born again’, an experience still at the heart of modern evangelical Protestantism.

This would always have driven a man like Luther, an odd mix of bruiser and dreamer, into a fight with the Church authorities. But it was the practice of selling indulgences that tipped him over the edge. What was an indulgence? In its most literal sense, it was the transfer of a little of the goodness of Christ and the saints (the ‘treasury of merit’) to a human sinner. The receiver of the indulgence then had
less time to spend in Purgatory – today sometimes seen as the dull airport lounge of the system, minus the duty-free shops, but then portrayed as a place of purging and agonizing fires, even of torture – before arriving in Heaven. It was not quite a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it was certainly a get-to-Heaven-quicker card.

How did you obtain an indulgence? Prayers and good works could win you one. Travelling to see and touch the relics of saints would, too – and this also brought useful revenue to whichever church or town had the relics (Wittenberg itself had a world-class collection of fragments of wood, bones, thorns and hair). But apart from prayers, good works and relics there was a more reliable route: hard cash. Priests had long suggested that recipients of indulgences might want to make a ‘charitable offering’, to say thank you, as it were. In time, this became a plain cash transaction. As Christ’s vicar on earth, the pope could simply sell indulgences. They became his money supply, notes that came in different denominations. He could not only sell them to buy the purchaser time off Purgatory, he could also sell them for the purchaser’s already-dead parents, who might be crying out to their children for the coins to be paid. Reform-minded clerics from Italy and Holland, France and Switzerland, had spoken out against the crass commercialization of indulgences before now: Luther’s blast would be altogether angrier.

The papacy has given history an impressive number of decadent villains, and Leo X, Luther’s adversary, was one of them. He was a Medici, the son of the great Florentine ruler Lorenzo the Magnificent, and brought up in an atmosphere of war, artistic exhibitionism and political intrigue. Made a cardinal when he was thirteen, he had little interest in religion as such. When Italian politics landed him the role of pope at the age of thirty-seven, Leo is reported to have said that since God had given him the papacy, ‘then let us enjoy it’. A fat, sweaty and hospitable man, he turned Vatican life into a perpetual Roman carnival of indecent plays, bull-fights, dances, banquets and races. Gold poured from his hands in a glittering stream of favours, patronage and personal retail therapy.

Leo’s most expensive problem was St Peter’s Basilica. The original church had been built under St Constantine in the 330s, over St Peter’s supposed burial site. It had fallen into disrepair and was being replaced by a gargantuan new church, intended to awe the world with its scale
and beauty. But in 1517 the church was a giant embarrassment, little more than a mucky building site. The huge expense was crippling the papacy. Leo’s solution was to declare a fund-raising drive through ever more, and more expensive, indulgences. In Germany a hyper-ambitious archbishop who was raising funds for his own purposes, would act as Leo’s agent. The German people would have to be squeezed, and then squeezed again.

In Luther’s Saxony, the squeezer-in-chief was a remarkable salesman called Johann Tetzel. Tetzel was a blow-hard televangelist from the age of pulpit oratory. He would arrive in town trailing a long procession of solemn, berobed priests and followers, and carrying the papal insignia and Leo X’s bull (a papal declaration, with the round seal, or
bulla
, hanging from it, showing its authenticity). Oak and iron coffers to receive the loot would be opened, a grand stall set up, and Tetzel would begin. His message was straightforward. If you wanted to avoid hundreds or even thousands of years suffering in Purgatory – pay up. If you wanted to release your dear mother or father from the torments – pay up. According to your wealth and ability – pay up. If this sounds like a satire on his style, the jingle for which he is remembered gives the authentic Tetzel style:

For Luther, this was more than the robbing of honest Germans to build a swanky new church in Italy. It was a terrible sin, which would condemn the innocent buyers of indulgences to hellfire, because it meant they would not properly repent or confront their sinfulness, or seek Christ’s forgiveness. The most profound matters of faith and punishment had been turned into a cash transaction. It was this that finally exhausted his patience. Protestant Christians the world over know that on 31 October 1517, Martin Luther strode to the oaken doors of Wittenberg’s Castle Church and nailed to them a list of ninety-five ‘theses’, or arguments for debate – an act of defiance aimed at the papacy. It may be so. The original doors are long gone and have been replaced by metal ‘heritage’ replicas.

Not a man crippled by personal modesty, Luther himself never mentioned the nailing of the theses. It was probably a later story. In Luther’s day the church doors were certainly used as a notice-board, a
place for announcements of all kinds. So for this locally famous academic monk to nail up some religious arguments would have been possible, though hardly necessary. Nor did Luther intend to start a revolution, or even directly challenge the institution of the papacy. These were points for discussion, in Church Latin, albeit made in his usual punchy style. His students at Wittenberg University would have heard it all before. Luther was still a Catholic, and much of what he said was still official doctrine.

To appreciate why Luther’s arguments spread so fast, we need to turn to another small town in Germany, this time in the north-west, Mainz-on-the-Rhine. Here, fifteen years before Luther was born, Johannes Gutenberg had died after inventing Europe’s first real printing press. The Chinese and Koreans had long used wood-block printing, and even ceramic printing. Woodcuts had been made in Europe too, long before Gutenberg. What he did was to bring together a system of casting individual metal letters, and groups of letters, so they could be arranged in lines of words, then inked and pressed into dampened paper or animal-skin vellum.

We know relatively little about Gutenberg himself, except that he was skilled in metalwork – we might describe him as a jobbing engineer – and at cutting precious stones; and he was an ambitious entrepreneur, eager to borrow money to build his business. Urban Germany, with its coalmines and stocks of iron ore, and its long-established tradition of making armour, arms and clocks, was not going through an industrial revolution – quite. But it was experiencing an industrious boom, a rise in the status and ambition of craftworkers who would pass on their skills.

Gutenberg bought paper from Italy, experimented with metal alloys and ink mixtures, and hired at least eighteen helpers for his six presses. He intended to produce a printed Bible and wanted it to look as reassuringly like a handwritten one as possible – rather in the way TV drama at first mimicked theatre, or early bloggers tried to mimic newspaper pages online. His planned first run of 180 Bibles of 1,282 pages each was a huge gamble, and in 1454 he had to raise money from all across Europe. His Bible took six months for the casting of the metal type, and two years to set and print. Then it was hand-coloured and illustrated, to make it look ‘real’. The effect was similar to contemporary handwriting, compared at the time to woven
black-and-white cloth, or textile – hence our word ‘text’. The whole process took about three years, as long as it took a scribe to write out a Bible by hand.
¹⁰
The scribe, however, produced one, Gutenberg 180.

Printing was an almost overnight craze. The Bibles were admired across Germany, the Low Countries, Italy and Spain. Gutenberg’s presses were turned over to other printed work, including grammars for schoolboys, savage tracts attacking the Turks, calendars; and above all, indulgences, made out like huge cheques, with only the time, date and signature to be filled in by hand.

Germany was soon awash with print. Some of the tens of thousands of pamphlets were medical and scientific; others were downright rude. Luther himself, in a sermon on marriage, complained that booksellers were peddling material ‘which treats of nothing but the depravity of women’.

So Luther’s theses too, nailed up or not, were quickly printed and distributed. He combined them into a single sermon, reprinted twenty-five times in two years. (At the same time, he also changed his pen-name from the Greek for ‘the free one’, Eleutherius, to the homely German Luter, and then Luther.) His arguments aroused intense interest among a clergy and laity already debating the question of indulgences, the correct notion of sin, and papal authority. During his heyday, Luther is reckoned to have produced, on average, a pamphlet about once a fortnight; his followers, such as the simple shoemaker-writer ‘Hans Sachs’, and his Catholic foes, contributed many more. Wittenberg had once depended on its ruler’s interesting collection of saintly body parts as a revenue-earner. Now it became a boom town because so much printing work was brought to it for the simple reason that Luther lived there.
¹¹

It could not be long before his arguments were heard in Rome. Set-piece confrontations were arranged. First, he took on fellow Augustinian monks in Heidelberg – and rather effectively; next, at Augsburg, one of Leo X’s brightest cardinals; then a brilliant rival theologian in Leipzig, where he was tricked into supporting the Czech reformer Jan Hus, who had been burned at the stake for heresy. Luther was himself condemned as a heretic in a papal bull, which he promptly burned in Wittenberg. Now his relish for a fight really took over. In three famous broadsides,
The Christian Nobility of the German Nation
(addressing those very members of society),
Babylonian
Captivity
, addressing the clergy, and
The Freedom of a Christian
, aimed at all readers, Luther demolished many of the arguments the Church’s authority had rested on. These included the special function of priests, their organization as clergy, and the supremacy of the pope.

He had taken the bull – and the
bulla
– by the horns. Again, this would have been impossible without printing presses: the last of these three books was published in thirty-six editions within two years, and translated into Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech and Latin. All Europe was blazing with argument. In faraway England, Henry VIII told his bishops to think up rebuttals to present against Luther. In April 1521 the newly appointed Holy Roman Emperor, the teenage Habsburg Charles V, confronted Luther in person at Worms, where the empire’s ruling council, or ‘diet’, was meeting. Confronted by his own books and told to recant, Luther famously refused. There is no evidence that he actually said: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ The words were written into his speech later, by an editor after Luther’s death. But they are too good, too resonantly right, to scrub out. For it was a potentially perilous confrontation. Luther might have expected to be burned at the stake despite the offer of safe passage to Worms.

After Worms, Luther was spirited away for his own safety by his ruler Friedrich, who kept him in the fabulously Germanic Wartburg Castle. There, disguised with a beard and a false name, Luther again did something amazing – he began translating the Bible into sharp, pungent popular German. He produced a New Testament quickly and then, over several years, a complete Bible. He boasted that he took his style not from the Latin, but from the street: ‘Ask the mother in the home, the children in the alleys, the common man in the market, about it and watch what comes out of their mouths.’ Many of his coinages, such as
Herzenslust
for ‘heart’s content’ and
Morgenland
for ‘the east’, remain in modern German. Luther said he wanted ‘to make Moses so German that nobody would suspect he was a Jew’, and his translation has been called ‘the central document in the evolution of the German language’.
¹²

The Bibles were soon on sale at the already famous Leipzig book fair, priced at roughly the cost of a calf, or two weeks’ wages for a schoolmaster, and by Luther’s death it is reckoned half a million were in circulation. Other Bibles in local European languages and dialects had a big effect too – Britain’s King James Bible is an obvious example
– but in some ways Luther’s impact on German is better compared to Shakespeare’s on English. The historian C.V. Wedgwood put it well when she said that German phrasing came to him almost too easily, ‘bursting forth in plentiful homely images, gross, earthy, graphic . . . his Bible was perhaps the most astonishing and highly personal translation ever compassed’.

So Luther had a nationalistic effect as well as a religious one. Slowly, one by one, northern German aristocrats and free towns came over to his side. Something similar was happening in Switzerland, Holland and Denmark too, where other reformers were busy. But it was obvious quite soon that Luther’s religious reformation and the beginnings of a new Church could not be neatly separated from social challenge, and even revolution. Pro-Luther crowds started destroying religious art. Strikes by miners and peasants against tax-gathering clerics used Luther-like arguments. Rebel clerics took the lead in mocking their old leaders and the old orders. Luther, who depended on the protection of an aristocrat and was himself from a prosperous family, began to seem nervous, insisting on the importance of temporal authority.